ATLAS Iron managing director David Flanagan has blasted the big three mining companies BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata for secretly reaching the MRRT deal with the Gillard government that unnecessarily disadvantages emerging iron ore producers.
The federal government would not stop at taxing coal and iron ore miners and would extend its tax to base metals and other commodities when it needed to replenish its supply of cash as a result of clinching the Minerals Resource Rent Tax deal, he told the Excellence in Mining and Exploration conference in Sydney today.
The guys who negotiated this deal they're multi-commodity, multi-country, and they've got access to the lowest cost of capital in the planet, he said.
Atlas is in the sweet spot for the MRRT and apparently we are in the same league as Olympic Dam even though we're not.
If you're an iron ore miner from the Pilbara like us you're being hit with another road block.
The role of juniors in discovering and developing projects had been overlooked by the government and the major companies, and this was having adverse affects on the global attractiveness of Australia as an investment destination.
The major companies have not made a major contribution to exploration in this country, he said.
The New York funds are now running from our projects like they were suffering from the plague. Singapore funds have also exited many Australian companies following the [announcement of the] tax.
Flanagan said the Australian investment community was unduly conservative and risk averse about the performance of junior iron ore producers.
We are being told by analysts that they expect us to start exporting from Utah Point in the middle of June 2011, but we actually did this on Friday, he said.
We're an unusual beast. We've jumped through all the hoops and are on target to be a 6 million tonne per annum run rate by the end of the year.
We're not like Fortescue because we are close to the port and have low capex costs.
We're an independent company that has made 39 acquisitions in two years. We have great people and we are generating cash flows.
Atlas started delivering ore to the new $A225 million Utah Point port at the start of the month. The port is a vital part of Atlass Pilbara growth ambitions.
The company is mining at a rate of 5Mtpa, increasing to 6Mtpa by Christmas and 12Mtpa from 2012.
