Malika Benarab-Attou

En partenariat avec "Friends of the Earth", il a été décidé au sein du Groupe des Verts-ALE d'écrire une lettre ouverte à la Présidence hongroise de l'Union européenne, au Président du Conseil européenne et à la Commission européenne à propos de la mine de Mopani en Zambie.

Cette mine, qui bénéficie de subventions européennes de la part de la Banque européenne d'investissement (BEI), est nocive pour l'environnement. Il est bien connu, d'autre part, qu'elle procède à des fraudes fiscales.

Cette lettre ouverte exige un moratoire des fonds publics de l'Union Européenne, y compris des fonds de la BEI. Plus généralement, cette lettre questionne la stratégie globale portant sur les matières premières de l'Union européenne en Afrique.

La lettre est en anglais, veuillez nous en excuser. Au besoin, merci de nous contacter pour de plus amples informations.

"Open letter to the Hungarian Presidency, the President of the European Council and the European Commission on the EU public funding for mining

Dear Mr Martonyi, Mr Van Rompuy, Mr Barroso and Mr Zourek,

A recently leaked audit* revealed how Mopani Copper Mine (MCM), a consortium that is mining copper and cobalt in the Zambian Copperbelt since 2000, was siphoning its profits out of Zambia to avoid paying tax, by relocating its profits to its mother company, the commodity trader Glencore AG, based in the very tax-attractive and secretive Canton of Zug, Switzerland.

Yet, in 2005, Mopani had received a EUR 48 millions loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB), on the resources of the Investment facility (IF). Not only it is striking that millions euros of EU development money went to a company using transfer pricing and tax avoidance, but it also appears the project did not fulfil the developmental and environmental objectives announced.

Indeed, while the project was supposed to reduce the environmental impacts of Mopani, recent analysis show that the emissions of pollutants (such as sulphur dioxide, dusts, arsenic or copper are largely above WHO accepted limits.) Besides, since 2005, Mopani developed the "in situ leaching" method on its mining site, an hazardous extractive process that already led to several acid leakages in the underground water. The massive use of acid, the enormous quantities of waste produced by the copper and cobalt extraction and the sulphur dioxide emissions that did not decrease severely question the EIB assumption that its support to Mopani would improve the quality of the environment.

The development impacts of Mopani are just as controversial. The company employs a lot of precarious workers with extremely low wages and greatly reduced the workforce when the copper price went down after the financial crisis, putting the entire region in a extremely delicate situation.

Therefore, it appears from this case that public money was invested via the EIB into a mining project run by a company with dubious tax practices, contributing little to Zambia's economy and budget, using social policies marked by a race to the bottom and having a devastating impact on the environment.

We are concerned that the Mopani project is only one example in a long row of similar mining projects that received EIB and EC support in Africa. In the last decade, the EIB has been involved in six mining operations in Zambia, and has invested hundreds millions euros in mining projects in Botswana, Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and on top of classical project finance EIB operates through dedicated funds such as the African Lion Mining Fund.

The mining industry is a risky activity with potential highly harmful impacts on local communities and host countries. It involves large multinationals that often have close links with non-cooperative jurisdictions and operate from all over the world which make them extremely difficult to control and hold responsible for their potential damages.

Today, the EIB, which is managing part of the EU development money, is not equipped to face those risks. We are therefore concerned that the EU raw materials initiative foresees an important role for the EIB in financing the mining sector and related infrastructure. In the way the EIB operates today, the EU risks to compromise its fundamental values and horizontal development and human rights objectives of its external action if it will give the EIB this role.

Therefore we, the undersigned MEP, call for a moratorium on the EU public funding for mining - including EIB support - as long as strong binding standards are not in place to guarantee the application of regulations that will prevent cases like Mopani to happen. This will require a thorough review of past experiences of EU support for the mining sector overseas - involving all stakeholders, according to the successful model of the World Commission on Dams or the World Bank's Extractive Industries Review - in order to inform the definition of new adequate legislative measures in this regard."

 * The leaked tax audit, carried out by tax specialists Grant Thornton and Econ Poyry, covered the activities of the mines from 2006 to 2008, and examined the trial balances since 2003. Despite the fact that the audit was finished in the fall of 2009 it was kept secret until Friends of the Earth France (FoEF), made it public