The Australian company that was the largest investor in the Bawdwin lead, silver and zinc mine in northern Shan State’s Namtu Township announced on Tuesday that it had sold all of its shares in the project and would be leaving Myanmar for good.
In the recent statement, Perth-based Myanmar Metals Limited (MYL) agreed, pending stakeholder approval, to sell its 51 percent stake in Bawdwin Joint Venture—its most well-known asset—to one of its local partners, Win Myint Mo Industries Co. Ltd., for US$30 million.
MYL, which has held stakes in the mine since 2017, had been trying to sell its shares since July. The Australian Stock Exchange-listed company voluntarily suspended its own trading activities immediately following Myanmar’s February 1 coup.
The company’s chairperson and CEO John Lamb said in Tuesday’s announcement that the sale represented a 75 percent return on its investment, which he described as a “good result considering the circumstances and compared to outcomes reported from other companies exiting their Myanmar positions.”
The other local partner company in the Bawdwin Joint Venture is EAP Global Mining Co. Ltd., which, like Win Myint Mo Industries, held 24.5 percent of the shares in the project.
In 2017, Win Myint Mo Industries was “described by local media covering Shan State as being a subsidiary of Asia World” in a report by The Irrawaddy, a reference to the conglomerate established by the late ethnic Kokang druglord Lo Hsing Han and now headed by his son, Steven Law. Law was once subjected to US sanctions for what the American government claimed was his role in the drug trade.
In June, Chinese conglomerate Yintai Gold had made a “non-binding conditional proposal” to take over MYL’s shares in the Bawdwin mine for A$66.5 million (US$47.6 million), half of its previously estimated value, the Australia-based Financial Review reported. The offer was dependent on “a site visit, legal and financial due diligence” among other approvals that would be difficult to carry out in the post-coup environment, the report said.
In Tuesday’s announcement, MYL “welcome[d] Yintai’s interest” but noted that at the time of reporting, “there ha[d] been no formal offer from Yintai capable of being accepted by MYL shareholders.”
The Shan public, civil society organisations and environmental activists have long called for foreign companies to divest from commercial mining sites such as Bawdwin, which is located in an active conflict zone that has seen ongoing clashes between the Myanmar army and multiple ethnic armed organisations based in the area.
The Bawdwin mine is around 40km upstream from a planned 210-megawatt hydropower dam on the Namtu (Myintnge) River. On the International Day of Action for Rivers in March last year, hundreds of villagers in northern Shan State gathered to demand a halt to both the damming of the Namtu and the Bawdwin mining project, citing fears of lead poisoning caused by runoff from the latter.
“The new dams and mining will impact the health and safety of thousands living along the Namtu. We urge the government to stop these projects before it is too late,” a local villager said at the time.
Hundreds of years old, Bawdwin is one of the world’s oldest mines and one of the top lead-producing sites. It has been well documented that the US’s 31st President Herbert Hoover made his fortune by investing in Bawdwin in the early 20th century.
