JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The South African mineral-law claimants, who took their grievances to a world body, said on Wednesday that they remained “fully confident” in the strength of their “expropriation claims” against the South African government.

Responding to Tuesday’s South African government media release on a two-month stay, the claimants in the Foresti versus the Republic of South Africa case, at the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), said that last month’s decision in the Pretoria High Court that South Africa’s Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) conversion clauses could amount to expropriation, had strengthened their belief.

The dispute of Foresti against the South African government arose out of the implementation the MPRDA on the investments in South African companies Finstone and Red Granite, which are engaged in the local granite/dimension stone industry.

“Our case is that it does amount to expropriation,” Webber Wentzel senior associate Jonathan Veeran told Mining Weekly Online.

“We are still confident in the merits of our legal argument and we haven’t been persuaded otherwise by the government’s counter memorial,” Finstone director Shawn Donly commented to Mining Weekly Online.

Red Granite SA MD Livio Zucchini said that he was surprised that the government had issued a statement unilaterally and had not opted to issue a joint statement.

The government statement had tended to indicate the success of one party over the other party, whereas an amicable solution needed to show the success of both parties, Zucchini added.

“We had to respond to the government statement because it was too one-sided,” he said.

High-level discussions had been ongoing with the South African government since December 2007, aimed at resolving the dispute.

South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry had put out the media release on the two-month stay of the ICSID proceedings.

“Contrary to their media release, the stay of proceedings was not agreed on to facilitate a ‘lodgement process’ of conversion applications, as the companies had submitted all their old-order right conversion applications prior to the effective date of the stay of proceedings,” the claimants said in a statement.

They said that the stay was intended to facilitate ongoing “amicable” discussions, which were aimed at recognising the “peculiarities of the dimension-stone industry” and accordingly resolving the dispute.

The ICSID’s arbitral tribunal gave effect to the stay, which would expire on May 28.

The stay followed the South African government’s submission of a 450-page memorial, accompanied by four witness statements, five expert reports and 19 volumes of documentary evidence and legal authorities.

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