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Harare - A Zimbabwean minister launched a verbal attack on
Impala Platinum Holdings [JSE:IMP] CEO David Brown, saying on
Wednesday he was “sick and tired” of the mining group’s failure to comply with
local black ownership laws.
“The problem with Brown is that he talks too much. We are
sick and tired of his delaying tactics,” Saviour Kasukuwere, the minister in
charge of Zimbabwe’s black empowerment drive, told Reuters.
Implats is the biggest foreign investor in Zimbabwe’s mining
sector and has become the prime target of a government drive to get all outside
companies to hand over majority stakes in their local operations to black
Zimbabwean investors.
Brown has been seeking talks with Harare but told Reuters he
was still in South Africa, where he is dealing with a strike at the company’s
Rustenburg mine that has cost it R2bn in lost output.
“We can only engage him if he comes here to implement the
law,” said Kasukuwere, a member of President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.
This weekend, Harare gave Implats two weeks to surrender
29.5% of its Zimplats unit to a state-run fund and threatened unspecified
sanctions if it did not comply.
Kasukuwere has previously threatened to cancel the mining licences of non-compliant firms.
