Sagittarius Mines is a joint venture of Xstrata Copper (62.5%) and Indophil Resources NL (37.5%). The joint venture holds a 40% controlling equity interest in the Tampakan project. Xstrata Copper is the operator. The 60% non-controlling equity shareholders are the Tampakan Mining Corp. and Southcot Mining Corp., known as the Tampakan Group of Companies.

Sagittarius President Peter Forrestal said the company would immediately file an appeal for a reconsideration of the govern-ment decision as permitted under the ECC application process. “We are concerned that this decision was not made on the merits of our mine project environmental impact state-ment, which fully complies with the require-ments of the DENR’s own ECC process and is backed by a world-class environmental impact assessment study,” Forrestal said.

“We believe this decision sets a prece-dent that contradicts the publicly stated views of the Aquino administration, name-ly that national laws that permit open-pit mining methods should have precedence over conflicting provincial ordinances. This lack of consistency by the national govern-ment poses a very real threat to investment confidence in the Philippines and intro-duces significant uncertainty to national government approval processes. It also hampers the project’s potential to make what would be a significant contribution to the economic and social development of southern Mindanao and the Philippines.”

The Tampakan project is located approximately 40 km north of General Santos City in southern Mindanao. Based on current planning, the mine is projected to produce 375,000 mt/y of copper and 360,000 oz/y of gold in concentrate over an initial mine-life of 17 years, with signif-icant potential for mine-life extension.

Estimated contained metal in total re-sources at Tampakan now stands at 15 mil-lion mt of copper and 17.9 million oz of gold.

Subject to all necessary community, government, and shareholder approvals, Sagittarius estimates that production from the project could begin by 2016.