...no reason for big business to want to support this Scomo Govt that is so good at making enemies with foreign countries (China, France, Serbia), for all their cock-ups, Australia and Australian businesses suffer from the consequences of their (LNP) actions.
...Indeed We Are the Choices We Make.
Novak, no mine: Rio Tinto’s Serbian lithium dream hits trouble
Serbia’s apparent decision to kill off Rio Tinto’s Jadar lithium mine project is a blow for the miner’s social licence to operate and its push to find growth.
Jan 21, 2022 – 9.43am
Has the spat over Novak Djokovic’s deportation taken another strange turn?
“All decisions (linked to the lithium project) and all licences have been annulled,” Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic announced overnight Thursday. “As far as project Jadar is concerned, this is an end.”
Just days after Novak Djokovic was deported, Serbia has delivered a blow to an Aussie great. Getty Images
We’re being facetious about this having anything to do with Novaxx, of course. The Serbian government and Rio have been hit with an aggressive campaign against the mine in recent months, culminating late last year in large protests calling for the government to withdraw its support and Rio to get out of the country.
Although Djokovic did ironically provide support for the campaign against the mine, posting a picture of those protests on Instagram and declaring the need for Serbia to have clean air, the bigger issue is a general election looming in Serbia in April; the sense within the Rio camp is that the project has been caught up in politics.
Brnabic certainly made it clear this was about the government heeding the will of voters. “We are listening to our people and it is our job to protect their interests even when we think differently.”
Is this “an end” to the project as the Serbian PM suggests? Rio, which says it is “extremely concerned” with Brnabic’s statements, is “reviewing the legal basis of this decision and the implications for our activities and our people in Serbia”.
Although a legal challenge is possible, the mining giant may also be hoping that the temperature around Jadar cools after the election, giving Rio the chance to strike a new deal with the government and assure local communities that the mine’s environmental impact can be minimised.
Rio said in its production report on Tuesday that it had pushed back the expected date for first production by a year to 2027 because of issues with gaining certain approvals. But even if Rio can reopen negotiations on the mine following the election, that timeline looks doubtful.
Rio boss Jakob Stausholm, who announced an aggressive strategy to align Rio with the global decarbonisation push last October, will no doubt feel frustrated that a project that aims to support the increasingly urgent energy transition has become bogged down in local environmental concerns.
Djokovic, like the rest of Europe and the world, wants clean air. But that becomes harder if projects like this don’t go ahead.
But Rio’s struggle to hold on to its social licence to operate in Serbia is also another blow for Stausholm as he battles to win back local community support in Australia following the Juukan Gorge disaster in 2020. In a world where it is getting harder and harder to overcome local opposition and get new mining projects up, failure in Serbia could become a black mark used against Rio on future projects.
Losing Jadar would also put another dent in Rio’s pipeline of growth projects - which is hardly chock-full as it is.
