Obstruction by competitive interestsI have a considerable position in this company, so I've been keeping a close eye on this fiasco. Any way I look at this, short of taking a trip to Armenia to poke around myself, this doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with environmental concerns...
1. The mine will be economically beneficial to Armenia as a whole. This is a no-brainer; it's undeniable.
2. The mine is being built through significant foreign investment.
3. The success of the mine is a significant test case for foreign investment, and failure of the project will have a massive impact on foreign investment relations going forward.
4. The mine is designed with high (if not the highest) standards of environmental safeguards. That's not to say that the balance of risk and precaution is currently appropriate, but it demonstrates Lydian is actively considering environmental concerns.
5. The mine is 80% built - complete enough that most of the hard work has been done, but not too late to integrate additional environmental mitigation measures.
6. It is laughable to think that this asset will be abandonned forever. The wealth is there, and now the infrastructure to extract it is just about there too. Whether through above-board channels, through corruption, or quite simply through violence, sooner or later someone will extract it.
7. Environmental outcomes under a company like Lydian will be infinitely better than those under an organisation who takes the asset over in some underhanded way, should Lydian be forced to abandon it.
Ok, so the only logical position of anyone motivated purely by environmental concerns is to demand better mitigation of whatever risks are the issue; it is not to demand the complete abandonment of the project, which in the long run will do more harm than good. The logical way to do this would be to engage with the relevant stakeholders and focus in detail on the specific issues that need to be addressed, then to develop satisfactory solutions. In fact, now is the perfect time to do this: the money required can probably be found (especially if the share price isn't decimated!), and the guys running the show now will actually do what's necessary.
But that's not what's happening. Instead, the activists are making broad-brush sweeping statements and using emotive and argumentative language to paint the project as a disaster and the company as irresponsible - and they are doing this systematically through the broadest possible range of media channels. The embarassingly primitive repeating-the-party-line posts by astroturfers on this very forum are a case in point. What's more, some of these have a distinctly anti-West flavour to them.
(Aside: I get it. Western foreign investment in the post-communist world is a double-edged sword. But this is a mine, a single project; this isn't privatisation of the country's infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc. Let's keep the large-scale economic risks in perspective, i.e., there aren't any)
So where were we? Right... The inconsistency of the protestors' actions with their stated concerns suggests a motive completely different to environmental objectives. Let's call a spade a spade: this is a concerted and systematic effort by competitive interests to destroy the company and take over the asset.
Are the activists protesting now because they finally feel free to do so, or has the combination of substantial mine completion and political chaos created the perfect conditions for the take-over? And who's behind it? The damage to foreign investment relationships means it's likely not someone who cares about this, i.e. not a foreign competitor. So is the company facing off with a local mining oligarch... or is the mine to be a sweetener in the Armenian government's pivot away from the West and towards Russia?
With regards to Amulsar, Media analysis seems to be portraying Pashinyan as stuck between removal of the blockades through law enforcement, which could be seen as associating him with his predecessor's deals, and listening to the voice of the people who helped him to power, despite the equally legitimate voice of the underemployed. Given the conclusion that the blockades cannot legitimately be environmentally motivated, and that therefore they are being staged by competitive interests, their removal is actually an opportunity for the PM to send a clear message that only legal, legitimate, and above-board ways of doing business are acceptable in Armenia.
PS - There's also the possibility that the activists and their backers are just causing some temporary uncertainty while accummulating the discounted shares. In that case, it's still underhanded, but kudos - well played!