Environment and Water Affairs Minister Djevdet Chakurov could be the recipient of a lawsuit if Canadian mining investor Dundee Precious Metals gets its way.

On April 27 in Grand Hotel Sofia, Dundee gave an informal media briefing to announce up front the company’s intentions to sue Chakurov in a Dutch arbitrage court if he does not issue permission to the firm to carry out its activities in the country without state participation.

Deputy Environment and Water Affairs Minister Chavdar Georgiev also attended the meeting, despite him not being invited by Dundee.

Dundee Precious Metals chief executive officer Lawrence Marsland said his company had been waiting for Chakurov’s approval of Dundee’s environmental impact assessment (EIA) for two years now and his patience had come to an end, after, on April 26, the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) issued a final decision obliging Chakurov to pronounce a decision. Marsland accused Chakurov of stepping outside his area of competence when requiring state participation in Dundee’s project for a gold mine in Chelopech, expansion of extraction and construction of facilities for working the ore into clean metal.

Marsland said that Dundee had contracts for the sale of raw material till the end of 2007 and because the world market was too narrow, the company intended to build the needed equipment for ore processing near the mine in Chelopech and leave the arsenic left by the processing in Bulgaria.

“We are constantly attacked by Chakurov with accusations of black PR,” Marsland said. “He requires senseless analyses,” he said, most likely having in mind the obligatory EIA chapter Strategies and Action Plans in case of operational or traffic accidents with cyanides, which was missing from Dundee’s 2005 (and last) EIA.

Questioned by The Sofia Echo whether his company prepared and presented to the Environment and Water Affairs Ministry such analyses, Marsland did not specify, only stating that they fulfilled all needed requirements.

Moreover, Marsland said he expected Chakurov not to take into consideration the SAC’s decision, in which case the company would sue the Environment and Water Affairs Ministry in Dutch arbitrage court because Bulgaria and The Netherlands had signed an agreement for mutual protection of foreign investments and Dundee’s shares in Bulgaria were under the ownership of Dutch firms.

Marsland did not say how long exactly he would wait for Chakurov’s decision. According to him, Dundee and Chakurov did not hold real negotiations because “these are not negotiations when a minister demands state participation in a private organisation. This is nationalisation,” he said. “We will never agree on (state participation).”

Dundee also presented the amount of investments the company made in Bulgaria since setting up here in 2003.

At the end of the meeting, the Dundee briefing host did not allow Georgiev to answer media questions because “he was not invited”, but he succeeded to say that the ministry had called for a public debate and it strove to protectinational interests.

Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath of Cyanide-free Rhodope (CFR) said to The Sofia Echo that according to her, if Chakurov was pressed to announce a decision, the scenario from the mine Rosia Montana (Romania) could repeat itself. There, the local environment minister returned the EIA for a second draft after a few years of postponement. A positive evaluation after the term (which is three months after public hearings on an EIA) is not legal, Bacheva-McGrath said. In the case of Rosia Montana, the investor Gabriel Resources immediately had to come up with a ready EIA and then repeat the procedure in 2006, she said.