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The mining mogul’s venture relies on Chinese cash despite fears over Beijing’s influence in resource-rich countries
When the new president of the Democratic Republic of Congo visited Washington in April, the mining billionaire Robert Friedland was waiting in a room at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel to greet him. Also there were the US ambassador to the DRC and Sun Yufeng, the head of China’s state-owned Citic Metals, the largest investor in Mr Friedland’s company Ivanhoe Mines.
Mr Sun and Mr Friedland wanted support for a new copper venture in the DRC that is set to solidify China’s influence over the resource-rich country — something that would not have skipped the attention of US officials taking part in tense trade talks ;with their Chinese counterparts across the city on the same day. Mr Sun told President Felix Tshisekedi about Citic’s ability to build large infrastructure projects, including roads, railways, ports and bridges, in the country — something few western mining companies could match. Since then Citic has agreed to invest an additional C$612m in the Toronto-based Ivanhoe.
The importance of the meeting for Mr Friedland was clear. Having helped discover two of the world’s largest mines, now, off a dusty unpaved road in the DRC, he believes he may have found a third: Kamoa-Kakula, a huge untapped copper deposit worth at least $10bn.
A university friend of Steve Jobs, the late Apple founder, and film producer whose credits include Crazy Rich Asians, Mr Friedland has made a career out of securing funding for, and then exploiting, mines in far-flung corners of the world and selling them for large sums of money. “Every time I go and see him I first zip my pocket,” says Pierre Lassonde, a Canadian mining veteran, of Mr Friedland’s ability to persuade investors to part with their cash. “He has that magnetic effect on people.”
But to finance this latest venture, which the 69-year-old calls “unquestionably the best copper development project in the world”, Mr Friedland has turned almost exclusively to China.
Chinese companies already own some of the richest deposits of copper and cobalt in the DRC and beyond, metals that are critical to the switch away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. They have invested at least $8bn in Congolese mining assets since 2012, with miner China Molybdenum buying the Tenke copper and cobalt mine from Freeport-McMoran for $2.65bn in 2016.
The control and dominance over global supply chains that this potentially gives China has triggered concern in the US. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced in September an initiative to help governments in resource-rich countries better attract investment from US companies by improving their regulatory standards. The state department’s Energy Resource Governance Initiative says it wants to “encourage a level playing field surrounding the critical minerals that underpin clean energy technology”, and includes the DRC as a “participant”.
Source: Henry Sanderson | Financial Times
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