A six-week disruption to gold processing has put further pressure on the cashflows of the Ballarat gold mine’s controversial owner.
The troubled Ballarat gold mine was unable to run its processing plant for six weeks over summer as slow progress on building extra storage for mine wastes came back to bite the cash-strapped Singaporean owner Shen Yao.
It was the second time the Ballarat processing plant had been halted because tailings storage facilities had exceeded regulatory limits; processing was also halted between September 21 and October 26 when heavy rains filled storages. Shen Yao has not yet published results for the three months to December 31, a 92-day period in which the processing plant was operating for barely 35 days.
“As the finance team is located at Ballarat, which is far away from the major cities like Melbourne and Sydney, with a very small candidate pool available, the company has faced difficulties in recruiting qualified personnel to fill the vacancies despite setting attractive remuneration packages.”Shen Yao was also hampered by very high turnover of staff in 2021, when many senior finance executives left the company.
Within ten months of that assurance, the processing plant was halted because of a lack of tailings capacity.Previous mine owners had developed plans for a big new tailings dam at Whitehorse Gully at the southern end of the Ballarat mine lease to provide close to ten years of additional tailings storage capacity.
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