Argentina tripled lithium carbonate production capacity in last two years
Argentina, the world's No. 4 lithium producer, has four projects in production.
Brazilian billionarie Eike Batista is facing demands from creditors to boost his collateral and is close to selling a portion of MPX Ernegia SA, reports Bloomberg.
The business magnate is trying to reduce collateral requirements by selling assets to pay down his debt. He used his publicly-traded companies as loan collateral when borrowing the cash to build up his group of businesses under EBX Group Co.
Batista has $2.8 billion in outstanding loans with the Itau Unibanco Holding SA in Sao Paulo. Additionally, he owes $2.4 million to Banco Bradesco SA plus another $805 million to Grupo BTG Pactual, which also gave him a $1 billion line of credit.
Net debt at his six companies more than tripled last year to almost $8 billion and posted a combined net loss of $846 million in the first nine months of 2012.
On the personal front, Batista lost about $25 billion of his own wealth last year.
He has been selling off other assets to raise cash. Last year, he sold part of his EBX to General Electric Co. and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Development Co. Batista’s also been trying to sell all of his gold company AUX, as well as his shipbuilder OSX Brasil SA.
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2012 Mining Billionaires: #1 Eike Batista
Brazil’s Eike Batista to delist coal firm CCX
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Wilson Dias, Abr
