Leaked documents expose Minerals Commission’s fast-tracked gold lease for ex-Chief of Staff ’s family

Thanks to the valiant Ghanaian citizen who just sent me all the documents related to how the Minerals Commission rushed through the gold mining lease application of a company owned & managed by the children of the former President’s Chief of Staff, one of whom doubles as the Head of Legal at Fidelity Bank.

It is quite clear that the Minerals Commission leadership was enabling politically connected individuals to violate sound mining standards as it dished out leases to them like toffees.

We will see how to use the information to trigger serious reforms. For now, I can share the following:

1. The company – Mech Resources – had zero track record in mining, quarrying, or any related field.
2. Yet, Mech Resources was not asked to provide evidence of any staff members it had on payroll with any serious skills in mining and its environmental risk mitigation.
3. The company was not asked to evidence any financial resources to fund the $25.8m they say they plan to invest upfront (arguably the remaining ~$135 million needed for the full lease period could come from revenue).
4. All they had to do was make some financial projections, write some grammar of plans they have, and voila, 9000 acres of land bearing 475,000 recoverable ounces of gold was just leased to them. Just like that!
5. At current prices, the estimated gold in place is worth $1.3775 billion dollars! Meanwhile, Mech Resources’ feasibility study shows that total operating costs over the lifetime of the mine will come to less than $100m. Meaning that over a billion dollars stand to be made in profits (before taxes).
6. The company couldn’t hire a professional accountant to even prepare the projections for its initial application. No sensitivity analysis. Weak discount factoring. Inability to model the impact of royalties. Essentially, whoever worked on the application had zero finance training.
7. A request by the examining officers for the specific names of water bodies being impacted was ignored and the issue was not addressed in the final report. As readers now know, an investigation by the 4th Estate shows that the various gold concessions owned by the former Chief of Staff’s family are adversely impacting major rivers in Ghana.
8. Most shockingly, even though the examining officers insisted in the initial review that a Water Resource Commission permit was necessary before the application could be approved, and several discrepancies regarding waste treatment and environmental factors needed to resolved, big bosses at the Minerals Commission managed to get these overlooked and the Minister was advised to issue the lease nonetheless.
9. Within 6 weeks after all these many problems were identified, the lease recommendation was ready. I now suspect that the other four gold mining leases that were hurriedly issued to the family out of the 23 they have applied for have similar issues.
10. Join me in thanking all those brave souls who keep leaking these useful documents to folks like us. Without them, the whole country would be sleepwalking to the slaughter.

[This is a developing story.]