I know this might be confusing, nobody has written any articles about it.
The EIA process is set out in Tanzanian legislation:
http://www.tic.co.tz/media/Environmental Audit Regulations 2005.pdf This is the Act which sets out what is required for an EIA.
For a mining licence (or special mining licence in the case of s 41(4)(e) of the Mining Act:
https://mem.go.tz/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/0013_11032013_Mining_Act_2010.pdf) the mining company merely needs to provide an environmental certificate (product of an EIA) with its mining licence application.
As we know, the Mining Act allows a mining company to require the government to remove people from land even prior to compensation payments.
However, I have not seen a publicly disclosed ESIA (on which MNS' EIA was based) to determine whether it is compliant with the Equator Principles.
All I know from announcements is that MNS says the ESIA was produced by MTL with the Equator Princples in mind
As discussed above, the Equator Principles seem to require publication of the ESIA.
So we can't say that EIA proves Equator Principles compliance (despite bold and underlined words) it merely shows compliance with Tanz legislation for environmental certificates for mining licence applications.
I think it is interesting that the companies' word is taken that the ESIA is Equator Principles compliant when it is not published. How do we know?
(20min delay)