The following Financial Post hold out some hope that the Colombians will cut EOM a break by reviewing last years decision to reject the EOM application. I doiubt they would open up the EOM application just to thrash them again. So, if EOM gets any break that would give them access to the original 16 million in resources, it will benefit all miners on the mountain. Any increase in the EOM SP will certainly raise the GWY SP ceiling.
When the Colombian government delegation arrived at last year’s PDAC, their presence was overshadowed by an incident back home in which more than 20 workers with Talisman Energy Inc. were kidnapped.
This time around, the message from mining minster Mauricio Cardenas Santa Maria is that the country’s resource sector is booming like never before as safety continues to improve and the government makes some changes to its institutional framework for mining.
He noted that foreign investment in the mining and energy sectors topped US$12-billion last year, which was easily a record and a nearly 50% improvement on 2010. That is largely due to its emerging gold industry, which is only beginning to take off.
“We’re probably the largest recipient of FDI relative to GDP in Latin America today,” he said in an interview.
Improved security is obviously part of the reason for improvement. Mr. Cardenas said that the government’s total take from energy and mining is about US$10-billion a year, which is roughly equal to what it spends on security.
He took over as minister last fall, and is in the midst of implementing a plan that would reward concessions through a competitive tender process. Companies would submit bids, and whoever offers the best production share to the government would get the assets. Under existing rules, many people were granted title to assets and then did no work on them, instead just flipping them to someone else.
One controversy that continues to cloud Colombia’s mining sector involves Canadian firm Eco Oro Minerals Corp. (formerly Greystar Resources), which wants to build a mine in environmentally sensitive moorlands at high elevation. The project has been overwhelmed by local opposition, but Mr. Cardenas said it will be left to scientists to decide which projects in that region should go forward and which should not. He expects an answer from government biologists within a few months.
“It’s not going to be political, it’s not going to be ideological. It’s going to be scientific,” he promised.