1/17/2024 0 Comments Electrum groupNot long after Steinmetz bought into Gabriel, his attentions were diverted elsewhere. Every time the mining project seemed set for government approval, mass protests would break out, legal appeals would succeed in overturning various mining and environmental permits and government ministers nominally in favour of Gabriel's plan would lose their nerve or vanish on election day. Shortly after Steinmetz invested $67.5m in Gabriel for 9% of the shares, Jonathan Henry, Gabriel's chief executive officer, an Irishman with a degree in zoology who had developed mines in Malaysia, Indonesia and Burkina Faso, told Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper: "I hope that they would all have good contacts with the Romanian government and are types that could open doors for us." Steinmetz was joined on Gabriel's shareholder register by gold-loving billionaires Thomas Kaplan, chairman of New York's Electrum Group, and John Paulson, founder of Paulson & Co, the hedge fund that made a fortune betting against the US subprime mortgage market just before the 2008 financial crisis. So when he and a couple of other ultra-wealthy investors emerged in 2009 as big shareholders of Gabriel, the company's then management team was quietly thrilled. In the global mining industry, he is known as the man who can make problems go away. One of the Gabriel investors is Israeli diamond billionaire Beny Steinmetz. In the murky, unpredictable world of Romanian back-room politics, a parliamentary approval vote could surface at any time, even if that's unlikely before the European Union elections later this month and Romania's presidential poll in November.īut the billionaires who took a big punt on Gabriel have not called it quits. There are too many billions of dollars at stake. Game over for Gabriel and one of the world's three biggest undeveloped gold projects? Don't count on it. I will fight for the interests of the Romanian state." The Romanian prime minister, Victor Ponta, said: "Obviously we will defend ourselves. Gabriel will take the position that the government has "moved the goal posts too many times" says Gabriel's London spokesman, Bobby Morse. Last month Gabriel confirmed it was preparing an international commercial arbitration case that would seek up to $4 billion in damages from the government for its failure to approve the mine. The vote was again rescheduled for this week but is again expected to fall by the wayside. Earlier this month, a Romanian parliamentary vote to approve the development of the $1.5-billion project near the village of Rosia Montana (Red Mountain) fell off the agenda as Gabriel threatened to mothball its Romanian operations.
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