JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – A company that showed diligence in applying for mineral rights ended up getting mineral ‘wrongs’, a court has found.

The Gauteng division of the High Court in Pretoria has ruled that Aquila Steel South Africa is entitled to the mineral right that South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) has been denying it.

The DMR has been exercising persistence in doing the bidding of the Pan African Mineral Development Company (PAMDC), even though this triple-government-owned organisation failed to convert old order rights into new order rights in the area concerned.

The upshot is that it has lost out, with this latest court ruling now potentially freeing up a huge area of Northern Cape ground for exploration.

PAMDC is a tripartite mining company registered in South Africa and owned in equal shares by South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

It has mineral rights over 1 700 000 ha of ground that has manganese, iron-ore, lead, zinc, copper, nickel, platinum, uranium, diamond and limestone potential.

The issue first went public in 2013 when the then Australia-listed Aquila Resources reported that its application for a mining right at the Gravenhage manganese deposit was being hampered by an alleged overlapping prospecting right.

The company said at the time that it had received documentation that PAMDC was the holder of the overlapping right and lamented that this conflicting right had been granted nearly a year after the DMR had accepted its Gravenhage application.

It described Gravenhage as being located at the northern end of its 147.8-million-tonne Avontuur manganese resource that had an average grade of 38.2% manganese.

It said further that during 2011, a definitive feasibility study had pointed to Gravenhage having a reserve of 20.2-million tonnes at an average grade of 40.1% manganese.

After discussions failed, the company announced that it would be taking legal action to protect its security of tenure.

Mining Weekly Online reported in September 2015 that legal proceedings had begun for a judicial review of its Avontuur prospecting right as well as the decision not to award it a mining right at the Gravenhage project.

Now the court has affirmed the award of both prospecting and mining rights, opting not to leave that to the DMR, the competence of which judge NB Tuchten called into question.