Leviev confident about finance for $1.9bn Namibian project
Leviev Group expects project finance to cover about three-quarters of a N$20-billion ($1.88-billion) plan to mine phos-phates from the Atlantic Ocean floor, off the coast of Namibia.
Financing “wouldn’t be that difficult”, says Kombayedu Kapwanga, MD of Leviev Group’s LL Namibia Phosphates unit. “About 25% of that will come from our own internal resources and the rest from project financiers.”
Leviev Group, the US holding company of the family of Israeli billionaire diamond mer-chant and real estate developer Lev Leviev, received permission from Namibia to build a $20-million pilot processing plant before the completion of an environmental-impact study by the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research and Sintef. Should the Namibia government lift a ban on marine mining of phosphate, Leviev Group would aim to start commercial production from the estimated two-billion-metric-ton deposit in 2018, Kapwanga says.
“There is nothing wrong with mining the seafloor – we have been doing that with diamonds for years now,” Kapwanga says. “The deposit will be exploited with little disturbance to marine life,” he adds.
The phosphate could supply agricultural markets in India and South America, in addition to Southern Africa, Kapwanga says.
“For us, the bigger market is in India and Latin America, the regions with bigger agriculture industries,” he says. “Namibia’s location makes it ideal to export to Asia and Latin America.”
Namibia’s Atlantic coast area holds an estimated 80-million carats of gems, the world’s richest marine diamond deposits, which were carried to the sea by the Orange river, according to De Beers, a unit of Anglo American.
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