Welcome to Mining Weekly. In this podcast, read by Mariaan Olivier of Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly, we bring you the past week’s top news stories from the mining industry in South Africa and the rest of the world.

In this week’s bulletin:
- Botswana aims to take its place among the diamond cutting and polishing centres of the world .
- Government expects to launch its far-reaching safety audit next month, and
- Camec presses ahead with DRC investment.

DIAMOND AMBITIONS

Botswana wants to be “no less” a diamond cutting-and-polishing centre than Antwerp, Jerusalem and Mumbai, Botswana President Festus Mogae says.

He comments that, for the first time, diamond cutting and diamond polishing are now taking place in Botswana.

He says that a total of sixteen cutting-and-polishing houses have been licensed and six of them are already operational.

The remaining ten would be operational in the next three years.

While Botswana is not asking the cutting-and-polishing houses to move their works to Botswana, it is requesting them to include Botswana as one of the places where they cut and polish diamonds, the president says.

SAFETY AUDIT

The Department of Minerals and Energy will be finished planning a safety audit of all South Africa's mines by mid-November, and will begin immediately therafter with the audit.

Chief inspector of Mines Thabo Gazi says the department has already begun the planning process.

This came after President Thabo Mbeki ordered the DME to carry out a national safety audit of South Africa's mines, following incidents where some three thousand two hundred miners were trapped underground after a falling pipe damaged a shaft at Harmony Gold's Elandsrand mine near Carletonville, and four workers died at AngloGold Ashanti's Mponeng mine.

Chamber of Mines safety adviser Sietse van der Woude says that the chamber will be hold an internal meeting to determine what input it would be able to provide government with for the audit.
DRC INVESTMENT PLANS

DRC-focused miner Central Africa Mining & Exploration Company, or Camec, says it is confident that a Lumbumbashi court will brush aside an application that State-owned Gecamines brought against the validity of its mining permits in the country, and is moving full steam ahead with its investments in the country.

By July, Camec had already invested more than one hundred and eighty million dollars in its DRC operations, and plans to boost this figure to two hundred and fifty million dollars by February 2008, when it would have reached its one hundred thousand tons a year copper production target.

However, a dark cloud, which the firm believed would disappear in the next three weeks, hangs over its mining operations, located near Lumbumbashi.

The saga began earlier this year, when Gecamines challenged the legitimacy of certain mining rights held by Camec subsidiaries in the country, and the DRC attorney general said they had been annulled and voided.

However, the company is confident that a DRC court will rule in its favour, within a couple of weeks.

Also, in this week’s Mining Weekly magazine, published on Friday, read our cover story on the return of Ergo.

Don’t miss our feature on Sasol Mining, which includes a report on the company’s plans to spend one billion rand on its coal-mining operations in the 12 months to June 30, 2008.

That’s a round up of this week’s stories on Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly. For more on these and other stories, visit miningweekly.com