ESBC Pressemitteilung: European Shareholders of Bougainville Copper: Mr. Albanese, please remove BCL chairman immediately! On Tuesday the President of the European Shareholders of Bougainville Copper, Axel G. Sturm, wrotea letter to Rio Tinto Chief Executive Officer Tom Albanese and asked him to remove BCL’s chairman Peter R. Taylor immediately. “We deeply regret that we do not have any other option as to do so.,” Mr. Sturm commented in a statement published today in Andorra. Since a couple of months, there is a strong positive move towards resumption of mining on the remote island of Bougainville. Bougainville hosts one of the world’s biggest copper-, gold- and silver resources, the Panguna mine. Due to secessionist unrest, BCL had to close the giant mine in 1989. Now, nearly twenty years later, most of the Bougainvilleans learnt that only resumption of mining can generate sufficient income to ease the worrying social and economic problems and to fund necessary infrastructure investments like rebuilding of schools, hospitals, roads, telecommunication etc.. “The Panguna landowners who I met in Port Moresby earlier in May officially invited BCL to come back and resume mining,” Mr. Sturm said, “but obviously Mr. Taylor does not want to listen to them attentively.” Mr. Sturm and his Vice President Mr. Dechen assisted the 2008 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Bougainville Copper in Port Moresby. They testify that the BCL management seriously violated existing corporate governance rules. “The voting results of the AGM, shortly thereafter reported to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) are purely faked figures,” Mr. Sturm explains. “There neither has been a serious control on justification to assist the AGM nor has the BCL management secured a regular counting of votes. The ESBC will not tolerate that AGM of Bougainville Copper, which effectively owns one of the potentially biggest copper mines in the world, is managed like a burger shop. Therefore, the ESBC also informed the ASX upon their claim to remove chairman Peter Taylor from heading BCL.” Furthermore, the ESBC in their letter complain about the chairman’s arrogance to not answering the landowners’ inquiries and the lack of corporate communications by BCL to its fellow stakeholders. “In May 2007 Mr. Taylor announced a so called “Three-Years-Plan” for reopening the Panguna mine. Since that date, Taylor did not release any further information of that plan to his shareholders. There is no information of a time schedule, no information of the roadmap and the steps to take, simply nothing,” said Mr. Sturm, “We the shareholders simply claim our legal right to be regularly and generally kept informed about the ongoing activities of our company. Although we accept that some sensitive contents might not be suitable to be published to a greater public. We strongly hope that Tom Albanese and other responsible managers of Rio Tinto take notice of these serious corporate governance violations and acknowledge that Bougainville Copper Limited needs a new and serious leadership that respects the legal rights of its shareholders and that is acting in a responsible, dynamic, active, creative, and motivated shareholder communication! The shareholders and especially the Bougainvilleans on the ground expect partners in BCL that they can trust in!” Quelle: http://www.bougainville-copper.eu/pageID_5695235.html
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