Asia Pacific Investment Development (APID) status in the Solomon Islands is under the radar screen of the Mines & Minerals Act after some irregularities surfaced in the process of their mining licence (ML) acquisition.
This was revealed by a member of the Mineral Board (MB), an authority that has the supreme right and power under the Act to approve any mining license issued to mining companies.
According to the source gathered, one weakness identified was the lack of good background knowledge about the company and their compliance with the Mines & Minerals Act since most of these MB members who were from different government ministries have little knowledge of how the provision of mining acts were applied along the processes, except for the Director of Mines and his Permanent Secretary (PS) that are well-versed with the fate of APID, but failed miserably to inform board members about the real situation of the company pertaining to adherence with Acts and Regulations of the Ministry.
The information gathered showed that APID has failed to comply with six years report demanded by the Mines & Mineral Act in order to set its record straight with the mining processes to acquire ML for West Rennell tenement.
According to a senior government officer who is also a member of the board, who has sincerely admitted that an approval for the Minister to grant mining license for APID has been reached by the board with a condition attached to it.
“The condition attached to the approval of their license is the land acquisition process which is very important for the company to sort out with the rightful landowners before extraction of soil could proceeds,” a member of the Mineral Board (MB) stated.
“Over sighting of other requirements stipulated in the Mines & Minerals Act as prerequisite before the granting of ML was an official error of board members from different offices other than the Ministry of Mines, since we have no clear knowledge of the processes involved but to go along with direction of the MB Chairman (Director of Mines),” he further stated.
Section 37 of Mines & Minerals Act it stipulated that one year under the pre-mining process company must produce four quarterly reports and one annual report. Thus the six years presence of APID on Rennell should total up to 30 reports as demanded by the Act but this was never lived up to.
Furthermore, section 30 and 31 of Mines & Minerals Act unveiled that the ML granted to APID did not comply with the compulsory requirement of Mining Company to produce a Mining Plan (MP) to be review by a third party, namely the South Pacific Applied Geosciences Commission (SOPAC) and an EIA report.
The Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) report was described as incompetent, very brief and does not reflects any quality in the efforts made to produce the EIA report compared to the EIA reports produced by the Sumitomo Company on its proposed mining operation in Choiseul Province, it was revealed.
Section six of the Mines & Minerals Act stated that the Minister will only issue license to the company upon the advice of the MB.
In the case of APID and its ML acquisition, a mineral board member admitted that lack of knowledge about the processes involved in order for the board to make the wise and right decision led to regrets and realisation that certain requirements within the Ministry’s Acts and regulations before ML is granted were overlooked.
“So this has raised the question of who would bondage a wound before treating it.”
These are inconvenience left behind by the NACRA government for the DCC government to look seriously on and ensure that the laws of Solomon Islands were not kept under the carpet.
Respond from APID regarding all these irregularities was referred back to the Ministry of Mines and Energy for further clarifications.
By AATAI JOHN
