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Given environmental concerns and sensitivities about foreign ownership, mining these days can be an immensely complicated business anywhere. This has proven to be especially true for a Canadian company operating in the southern Philippines.
TVI Resource Development (Philippines) Inc. —a Filipino-Canadian venture affiliated with Calgary-based TVI Pacific Inc. — has weathered the fallout from a series of sinister emails that were sent to senior politicians, military officers and journalists.
The correspondence purported to show company officials were conspiring to assassinate a local leader and launch violent attacks on small-scale miners whose claim that they had pre-existing rights in the area where TVIRD is developing a gold and silver mine had been rejected by the government agency responsible for mining.
“To cut to the end of the story first, they established with 100% certainty that the charges were totally fabricated,” said John Ridsel, a Canadian who was TVIRD’s chief operating officer in the Philippines until mid-2011 and remains a consultant.
To prove the emails were fraudulent, TVIRD hired two cyber forensic firms. A separate inquiry was undertaken by the Philippine National Bureau of Investigations. The probes found that there were glaring inconsistencies in format and content between the company’s usual emails and those alleging gross human rights abuses that had been circulated to politicians, journalists and NGOs opposed to mining in Mindanao. A few of the emails turned out to have been original documents that had been doctored.
“That still leaves the question of how this happened,” said Mr. Ridsel, who worked for Petro-Canada for years in the Middle East and elsewhere after having been a journalist in Alberta for the CBC. “Why did these emails get believed up to the top levels of the Philippine government? I don’t know the answer to that question because they were so obviously fakes.”
The motivation of those circulating the bogus letters was clear enough. There is believed to be substantial gold and silver deposits at TVIRD’s new mine site in Mindanao, and some big investors want in with or without the government’s permission.
Despite having been cleared of any wrongdoing, TVIRD’s reputation in the Philippines suffered a serious blow because the company, which has operated in the Philippines for more than 20 years, endured several months of extremely negative publicity. Nevertheless, TVIRD — which like most mining companies must be 60% locally owned, although the Canadian parent has until now provided all of the equity — intends to go ahead with its controversial project in Mindanao.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://business.financialpost.com/2013/10/25/canadian-miner-rises-above-obstacles-in-philippines/