By Divya Rajagopal and Felix Njini
TORONTO (Reuters) -Barrick Gold will resume operations at its shuttered Loulo-Gounkoto mine in Mali once authorities in the country allow it to resume gold shipments, CEO Mark Bristow said on Wednesday.
The Canadian miner said it has been assured by Mali that gold worth about $245 million seized by authorities still belongs to the company, Bristow told Reuters in Toronto. Mali and Barrick have been locked in a dispute since last October over the country’s new mining code.
The miner’s shares rose as much as 6% on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Wednesday morning.
Barrick is the largest investor in Mali. However, the tensions between both parties escalated when Mali detained four employees of Barrick, issued an arrest warrant for Bristow, and earlier this year seized gold from Barrick’s mine.
“We will start the operations as soon as we get approval to ship the gold and we need to ship the gold to pay anything to the government,” Bristow said, adding that Barrick paid $460 million to the Mali government last year.
“So if you calculate that to per week… and every week we don’t do this it hurts everyone,” he added.
Barrick has also filed an international arbitration against Mali to find a resolution to the dispute.
Bristow said that Mali was not a short-term project for the company and it plans to stay invested in the country.
(Reporting by Divya Rajagopal; Writing by Felix Njini; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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