Glencore on collision course with Zambian government over energy tariff removal

godfred akoto

August 28, 2017 7:56 AM

Glencore is one of the world's biggest commodities trading companies

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The Zambian government has urged commodities giant Glencore to accept new electricity prices at one of its copper mines in the country according to a presidential spokesperson.

Mopani Copper Mines is a joint venture company owned by Glencore which has a 73.1% stake, First Quantum Minerals which holds 16.9% and ZCCM-IH which has a stake of 10%.

The government has removed state energy subsidies leading to the Copperbelt Energy Corp,an energy distributor slashing its supply to the mines from 130MW to 94 MW, a move which has led to Glencore threatening to cut almost 5,000 jobs at the mine.

“Although we shall work on optimizing the use of the limited power that we are receiving, we expect that we shall effectively have to close several areas and our scaled back operations may affect a total of 4,700 direct employees."

According to presidential spokesperson Amos Chanda,Mopani was the only mining company finding difficulty with the decision to remove the subsidies.

“We do not have problems with any other mining company other than Mopani and they are mining the same copper. If those reforms have been

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