Vedanta to exclude base metals business from sweeping demerger
The group said it will consider the base metals business demerger at a later stage.
Chile’s state copper company Codelco, the world’s top producer, announced today that it has used its rights to exercise its disputed option to buy a 49 percent stake in global miner Anglo American’s southern Chilean properties.
As reported by Mining.com during 2011, Codelco is disputing in court the option with Anglo American, which sold last year a 24.5 percent stake in the assets to Japan’s Mitsubishi, reducing Codelco’s potential stake by half.
“If necessary, Codelco will exercise all necessary actions to defend and safeguard its legitimate rights and demand the fulfillment of the contract that Anglo American seeks to ignore,” said the company in the statement released today.
According to Anglo’s lawyer Cristobal Eyzaguirre, however, Codelco’s actions are “nothing more than a desperate attempt to obtain a huge profit to which it never had a right,” he said in an e-mail distributed late November.
He added that Codelco and some Chilean authorities had attempted “to deprive a foreign company of a legitimate right in accordance with the law and valid and existing contracts”.
