The battle for control of the world’s richest lithium deposit has escalated into a potential $4.6 billion market wipeout, legal disputes, and ferocious feuding.
Eight months ago, a former business journalist working from a modest London apartment on the south bank of the Thames, David Robertson, penned a three-page letter to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Securities Exchange.
AVZ chief executive Nigel Ferguson and DRC businessman Marius Mihigo seated next to President Felix Tshisekedi.Ferguson isn’t well known in Australian business circles. But if he gets his huge mine built near the sleepy town of Manono in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – there is a still a chance he can pull it off, albeit a slim one – Ferguson could become as important a figure in the global mining industry as Andrew Forrest or Gina Rinehart.
“We are talking potentially 10 to 15 per cent of the current market, and if we supersize ... we are probably looking at 25 per cent of the market,” Ferguson told 121 Mining TV, an online news site.AVZ’s licence allowed it to drill to determine how much lithium there was in the deposit. The company didn’t have a permit to construct a mine, or the $US545 million to build it and provide infrastructure to transport the ore across Africa for shipment overseas.
Ferguson, writing in the company’s annual report, explained it this way: “Our success did not go unnoticed with other mining companies and ex-partners in Dathcom Mining suddenly wanting to again be part of the project but had no legal basis for acquiring new shares or had already sold their shares legally to AVZ. Claims from these companies are spurious of nature and hold no legal basis.”
Internally, the company felt under attack. After spending millions on geological surveys, Zijin Mining was using Congo’s courts to split control of the deposit, the board believed.
Mihigo’s social media profile boasted of a Harvard and Oxford education and placed him in Sandton, one of Johannesburg’s wealthiest suburbs. AVZ’s investigations suggested he moved to Sandton in 2019, around the time left a job working for DRC President Felix Tshisekedi. He had run an Ivory Coast security company before establishing a company providing high-level consulting and lobbying services, according to the report.
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