The Government of Panama presented this Tuesday the plan for the closure of the open-pit mine Cobre Panama, the largest in Central America and whose operation, in charge of a subsidiary of the Canadian company First Quantum Minerals (FQM), was disqualified by a court ruling.
This so-called ‘Action Plan for the Orderly and Definitive Closure of Cobre Panama’ contemplates a chronogram that will start next “December 23 with the organization of the temporary phase of environmental preservation and safe management, and will extend until June 2024, with the beginning of the elaboration of the Orderly Final Closure and Post Closure Plan”, stated an official communiqué.
The Minister of Commerce and Industry, Jorge Rivera Staff, specified in an appearance before the media that the plan contemplates three specific strategies: the orderly and definitive closure; the defense of the State before international arbitration; and the sustainable substitution of metallic mining in the national gross domestic product (GDP).
During the development of this closure plan, the Executive will be accompanied “by qualified professionals, national technical specialists and the advice and collaboration of other governments and international organizations with the highest experience and credibility in their different fields”, said Rivera.
The minister was emphatic in pointing out that after the judicial ruling at the end of last November which declared unconstitutional the 20-year extendable concession contract of the mine, “the activities of extraction, processing and commercialization of the mineral have completely ended in the project”, developed by the company Minera Panamá.
However, “there are a series of minimum activities of environmental preservation and safe management of the facilities that cannot be completed overnight, they must be part of the orderly closure of the project, for which they require inputs and personnel to be carried out,” he said.
These activities include the activation of the “temporary environmental preservation and safe management plan”, which “has 5 specific lines of action that have to do with, and at this moment is a priority, the physical and chemical stability of the project, especially of certain priority facilities”, said the minister.
In the orderly and definitive closure of the Cobre Panama project, environmental and technical mining audits will also be carried out, as well as the Orderly Final Closure and Post Closure Plan of the mine”, the latter in a “very particular circumstance”, because it is not a mine at the end of its useful life, but at the beginning of it, he explained.
“In scenarios of the termination of a mine’s useful life, the closure process takes between 6 and 18 months to elaborate and up to 10 years or more for the implementation of such closure plans. We know that this is not the case,” Rivera stated without further comment.
With the declaration of unconstitutionality, based mainly on environmental aspects and protection of the right to health, the contract, which infringed 25 articles of the Magna Carta according to the court ruling, ceased to exist.
FQM has already announced the initiation of an international arbitration before a court based in Miami (USA) and has shown its intention to initiate another one based on the Canada-Panama Free Trade Agreement.
Cobre Panama is a $10 billion investment, whose operation represented 4.8% of the GDP, according to data from the company, which began exporting the mineral in 2019.
It was the only exploitation of this mineral in Panama and in 2022 was the fourteenth largest copper mine in the world in production, according to data provided to EFE by the International Copper Study Group (ICSG).
With a payroll of 7,000 direct employees, more than 2,500 have already taken part in a voluntary retirement program, informed the company last weekend, which is managing the dismissal of 4,000 people, according to available information.