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Authorities in Mali have issued an arrest warrant for Barrick Gold Corp. chief executive officer Mark Bristow in a fresh escalation of a tax dispute in the West African country, Malian journalists have reported.
Copies of the arrest warrant, posted by one of the journalists on social media Thursday, show that Mr. Bristow is being charged with money laundering and violating Mali’s financial regulations during the period from 2019 to 2023.
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An Ontario court has dismissed a pair of civil suits against Barrick Gold Corp. that alleged it was responsible for human-rights abuses at a Tanzanian mine, with the judge ruling that any such court action should be tried in Tanzania.
The plaintiffs are a group of Indigenous Kurya from villages around the mine who were injured in 2021 and 2022 when the Tanzanian police force allegedly shot at them, as well as family members of victims who were killed during this period allegedly by the police.
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Barrick Gold Corp. says four of its local employees have been “unjustly imprisoned” in Mali in a second wave of arrests of its staff in the West African country where one of its biggest gold mines is located.
Mali’s military regime, which took power in a 2021 coup, has been putting pressure on foreign mining companies to give the government a bigger share of their revenue. It has been seeking US$417-million from Barrick, alleging that the company failed to pay all its required taxes – a charge the company rejects.
(Bloomberg) — Most of the world’s top gold miners have seen their shares surge this year as bullion prices hit repeated record highs. Not Barrick Gold Corp.
Missed production targets, higher operational costs and political turbulence at mines in Africa and Asia have investors turning increasingly sour on the world’s second-biggest gold producer. On Thursday, Barrick posted gold output that missed analysts’ estimates for the 11th straight quarter.
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Barrick Gold Corp. chief executive Mark Bristow says the Canadian gold miner is prepared to fork over to Mali more than half of the economic spoils from mining in the country, as it toils to put an end to yet another fiscal dispute with an overseas government.
Toronto-based Barrick over the past few years has bounced from one fiscal dispute to another with several host countries over taxes, royalties and joint-venture stakes in its mines overseas. After patching up disputes that lasted for years with both Tanzania in East Africa and then Papua New Guinea in the southwestern Pacific, Barrick this year has tangled with Mali’s military junta in West Africa.
Mali’s military government has threatened to take back Barrick Gold Corp.’s Loulo mine concession when the current permit expires in 2026, amid an escalating dispute over how to divide the economic benefits from operations in the country.
Mali is considering letting the permit for Loulo lapse when it expires in February 2026, Finance Minister Alousseni Sanou said in an Oct. 18 letter sent to Barrick’s chief executive officer Mark Bristow, and seen by Bloomberg. Mali “reserves the right not to renew the operating permit” and invited Barrick to talks on the mine’s “transition phase” starting later this month, Sanou wrote.
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Barrick Gold Corp. is asking an Ontario judge to dismiss lawsuits alleging that its subsidiary in East Africa committed human-rights atrocities in the vicinity of its North Mara mine, arguing that the matter should be litigated overseas.
Barrick is defending two civil cases in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, one from November, 2022, and another from February of this year. The plaintiffs are Indigenous Kurya from villages around the mine in Tanzania who were injured in 2021 and 2022 when mine security police allegedly shot at them, as well as family members of victims who were killed during this period allegedly by the police.
Mali’s military government is seeking at least 300 billion CFA ($512 million) in outstanding taxes and dividends from Barrick Gold, according to a Reuters report.
Authorities in Mali briefly detained four Malian staff members working for Barrick last month.On Sept. 30, Barrick stated it had agreed with the government to resolve existing claims and disputes.
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Four senior employees of Barrick Gold Corp. have reportedly been arrested in Mali in the latest sign of rising tensions between the Toronto-based mining company and the authoritarian military regime that runs the West African country.
The four Malian employees of Barrick were arrested for alleged financial crimes, according to a report by Reuters, but no details have emerged.
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Barrick Gold Corp. chief executive officer Mark Bristow is raising the possibility that he may retire in 2026. Mr. Bristow took over as CEO in 2019 after Toronto-based Barrick acquired Randgold Resources Ltd., the Africa-focused mining company he founded and ran for about two decades.
Hard-nosed, detail-oriented and outspoken, the South African is one of the most driven executives in the mining industry. At Barrick, he has stickhandled multiple difficult situations, including patching up multiyear mining contract spats with the governments of Tanzania and Papua New Guinea.
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London’s bullion market association is abandoning a jurisdictional challenge to a lawsuit by Tanzanian claimants, setting the stage for a British trial into allegations that the association is wrongly giving human-rights clearance to gold products from Barrick Gold Corp.’s controversial North Mara mine.
The lawsuit was filed in London in 2022 by relatives of two Tanzanian men allegedly killed by security forces at the North Mara gold mine, but the jurisdictional argument had delayed the trial for nearly a year.
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Barrick Gold Corp. is signalling it could be in for a protracted slog in Mali, as the big Canadian gold miner pushes back on the military government’s demands for a greater share of the country’s mining spoils.
Barrick on Wednesday said Mali is seeking unspecified changes to the tax, financial and legal regime at its Loulo-Gounkoto mining operations. The site is on track to produce 535,000 ounces of gold this year and is the company’s biggest operation by far in Africa.
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Barrick Gold Corp. is being accused of using the virtual format for its annual general meeting to suppress critical questions from stakeholders. After holding a hybrid AGM last year that allowed stakeholders to show up in person, the Toronto-based gold mining company, which is the world’s second biggest by market value, went to a virtual-only format this year.
Virtual AGMs have attracted the ire of some shareholder-rights groups. In an open letter to members of the S&P/TSX 60 Index in April, a group of 38 institutional investors, advisers, portfolio managers and non-profits argued that online meetings can undermine shareholder rights, by allowing companies to cherry-pick questions, or change the wording of them.
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Barrick Gold Corp. is facing mounting pressure in Mali as the country’s military regime seeks to boost its control of the multibillion-dollar mining sector at a time of growing Russian influence over its economy.
Mali’s junta, which seized power in a coup in 2021 and later forged an alliance with Russian troops, has been targeting the mining sector for more than a year with a controversial audit of the industry and a new mining code to authorize greater state control of mining companies.
Barrick Gold’s (TSX: ABX)(NYSE:GOLD) ongoing push to expand its global portfolio has prompted the company to revisit its presence in the Latin American market.
The world’s second largest gold miner has in the past year been particularly interested in Peru, where it was the second top gold producer until 2018. According to local newspaper Gestión, Barrick recently submitted a request to obtain a mining concession for 400 hectares in the southern Puno district.
