Codelco press release: ------------- The Constitutional Court...

Codelco press release: ------------- The Constitutional Court (TC) today announced the unappealable inadmissibility of the request filed by Minera Salar Blanco SA to declare unconstitutional the Special Contract for the Operation of Lithium (CEOL) signed by the Ministry of Mining with Codelco subsidiary, Salar de Maricunga SpA. After receiving the discharges of Codelco, its subsidiary and the Ministry of Mining and summoning the parties to an audience of public allegations, the court declared the request inadmissible for "lack of plausible foundation." In his preventions, the president of the Constitutional Court, Iván Aróstica, pointed out that in this case "it is not a matter of protecting an activity of the private sector against the undue interference of the state, but of concretizing a task that would be reserved precisely for the state." Codelco's legal advisor, Nicolai Bakovic, described this ruling as "a strong support for the seriousness and legitimacy of all the efforts that Codelco and the Mining Ministry have been developing for more than two years to comply with the presidential mandate to develop an integral and sustainable lithium project in the Salar de Maricunga, in the Atacama Region." Minera Salar Blanco SA, belonging to the Chilean businessman Martin Borda, the Australian company Lithium Power International and the Canadian Bearing Lithium Corp , has undertaken various legal actions and efforts to try to stop the CEOL and / or its effects. To date, all have been rejected in different venues (Comptroller General of the Republic, Court of Appeals of Santiago, Court of Defense of Free Competition and Constitutional Court). With the TC decision, the Santiago Court of Appeals will now be able to rule on the Economic Amparo Appeal filed by Minera Salar Blanco SA, which was suspended pending the ruling that became known today, and which allows it to resume its regular processing which, in Bakovic's opinion, should also be rejected given that "the consistency of the arguments of Salar Blanco SA has continued to weaken in the face of the repeated rulings and adverse rulings it has received, which does not prove arbitrary discrimination in economic matters, given that the exploration and exploitation of the resources in question, are exclusive to the state, as the TC has reaffirmed in its sentence today