BHP expects China’s growth to ease modestly over short term

Bloomberg reports demand for diamond jewelry in India may slow as a surge in prices discourages buyers. Polished diamond prices, which jumped about 60 percent to 70 percent in the last six months, may gain further in the next few months, said Sandeep Kulhalli, vice president, retail and marketing at Tanishq, the jewelry retail chain owned by Titan. The company is India’s biggest retailer of gold jewelry.

Speaking at the Diggers & Dealers conference in Kalgoorlie Australia, Robert Friedland, executive chairman of Ivanhoe mines made big claims for the new mine his company is constructing in Mongolia together with major shareholder Rio Tinto. Oyu Tolgoi is now one third complete and according to Friedland would have a life of more than a century. The mine is on track to produce more than 1.2 billion pounds of copper and 650,000 ounces of gold each year. Oyu Tolgoi will also help turn Mongolia into the world's fastest-growing economy with staggering GDP growth of 35%. Just to make sure no-one has any misconceptions of the grand scale of the project Friedland boasted that Oyu Tolgoi has 14,200 builders, easily overshadowing the largest construction project in the US, the new World Trade Center with only 2,300. And just to top things off he said Ivanhoe is worth at least double the $15.6 billion valuation the market is affording it at the moment.

Atlas Consolidated Mining and Development Cop. said it has completed the acquisition of a 45.54 percent stake in Carmen Copper Corp. owned by a Singapore-based investment fund. Atlas recently raised $390 million in debt and equity to finance the deal. Carmen Copper is acknowledged as Southeast Asia’s largest copper mine during its peak, serving as a major backbone of Cebu in the Philippines' economy for over 50 years before a devastating typhoon and metal price slump led to the mine’s closure in 1994.

Sunday's resignation of a state-level Indian politician brought down by a fraud scandal related to iron ore exports is likely to shake the confidence of foreign investors in Canada, says a top Indo-Canadian banker. Hari Panday, founder of the ICICI Bank in Canada, urged the Indian government to explain its mining policies to Canada — the "mining guru of world" — as well as to important mining jurisdictions Australia and South Africa.

The chief minister of a southern Indian state who is accused of being at the centre of a $3.6 billion mining fraud resigned on Sunday, AFP reported. B.S. Yeddyurappa, 68, head of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government in Karnataka, was named earlier this month in a report into corrupt mining practices by the Karnataka state ombudsman. The minister was accused of enabling illicit iron ore mining.

Investors rewarded Centerra Gold on Friday after the company reported it more than doubled net profits at $71.1 million on revenues of $243.8 million, up over 60% compared to the same quarter last year and announced a special and annual dividend payment of $99.3 million. Centerra Gold, which owns gold properties in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia and has earn-in agreements in Nevada and Turkey, added 1% by midday Friday and was one of the few gainers among precious metals miners. Sector heavyweights Goldcorp and Kinross lost over 1.5% while Barrick was also trading weaker despite a rampant gold price.

NMDC Ltd, India's largest iron ore producer and exporter in the public sector, said on Thursday it plans to open a new iron ore mine in Chhattisgarh.

China Briefing News reports state-owned Shenhua, the leader of a joint Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, and US consortium awarded the western block of Mongolia's Tavan Tolgoi coking coal field – the world's largest – faces a rocky road ahead to bring the project to fruition. According to CBN the political structuring is typical but none of the three operators have given public explanations as to how they may proceed or even work together. While losing bidders from Brazil, India and South Korea are smarting, Japan have gone so far as to call the bidding process'extremely regrettable'. And all this while Mongolia hopes to raise as much as $5 billion privatizing Tavan Tolgoi early next year.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, one of India's largest political parties, forced the resignation on Thursday of B. S. Yeddyurappa, the chief minister of Karnataka. Yeddyurappa was indicted on Wednesday after an investigation found that he had received kickbacks from mine owners in his district.