ASX Today, page-15134

It’s certainly an interesting topic. The ESG credentials of all companies are becoming more and more important for large fund investment. I suspect that any mining company which even suggests support for what the general public perceive as being “inappropriate practices” will struggle to maintain longer term funding support. You can see it already with withdrawal of funding opportunities for some coal operations in Australia. Very glad LTR have such a keen focus in all aspects of ESG as it will be critical to the bigger engagements later on.

Regarding other operations, well I don’t want to be seen to be cross promoting but I did find some interesting reading in the presentation material for another Li entity where it spoke about allowing what I believe would be non-licenced mining activities to continue to take place on their land; support buying the output from those miners and hope to graduate those persons to be employees with qualifications to work for the entity.

Now what I can’t understand is how that form of operation would be seen to be truly supportive of the community - isn’t that just another form of letting sovereign resource rights be extracted without licence (and thus royalties?) - unless the intention is to include that stock in the count of material mined by the entity and thus royalties etc are accounted for … but then does that mean lack of worker’s rights, equipment support etc. Seems a bit convoluted to me, I much prefer the local employment and community engagement of the Australian mining entities which have full community support.