The Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) has ordered Environment and Water Affairs Minister Djevdet Chakurov to announce his decision on the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the Canadian firm Dundee Precious Metals’  gold mining project near Kroumovgrad, Bulgarian-language daily Dnevnik reported on February 14.

The project, developed by the company’s daughter firm Balkan Mineral and Mining, was blocked because of Chakurov’s silent refusal, against which Dundee appealed in the court.

The Ministry of Environment and Water Affairs (MOEW) said it would study the SAC’s decision and decide whether to appeal against it to a higher administrative body.

In November 2006, a five-member panel of the court required the three-member panel of the SAC to pronounce a decision on the case. The lower administrative body had refused to consider Dundee’s complaint.

Dundee’s $75 million project at the Ada Tepe deposit near Kroumovgrad, south-eastern Bulgaria, has been delayed by more than six months. In 2005, the company started procedures to register the deposit as a commercial site, which, by law, gives them concession rights. Dundee had to prepare an investment project and an EIA report. Chakurov did not pronounce his decision on this environmental impact assessment.

A similar project in Chelopech has also been delayed – by more than a year. Dundee filed a complaint to the European Commission. Chakurov told environment committee MEPs that his opinion was that the concession contract with Dundee for Chelopech did not protect national interests, as the profit for Bulgaria was only 0.75 per cent.

At the end of January, Chakurov said that the state should participate in the gold mining process.

In a letter to Claude Rouam, the Head of Unit of Enlargement and Neighbouring Countries, DG Environment, Fidanka Bacheva of CEE Bankwatch Network wrote: “Environmental NGOs from the coalition Cyanide-Free Bulgaria welcome the most recent decision of the SAC”.

She continued that “due to the delay in the legal time frame for the environmental impact assessment decision-making procedure, we are expecting the suspension of the project environmental impact assessment as the only logical and legal resolution”. Bacheva said that the EIA had failed to address a number of significant issues. It lacked important information about the proposed cyanide technology for gold extraction, as well as strategies and action plans for cases of operational and transport accidents, she said.

Another member of the coalition, Petko Kоvachev of Green Policy Institute, told The Sofia Echo that they expected Chakurov to publicly announce his decision and “to be brave enough to state the obvious: that the project will not receive a positive EIA decision due to the ecological problems that will follow its realisation”. He said that the coalition was aware that Chakurov was experiencing heavy pressure from different sides, “pressure serving corporate and political but not social interests”. Kovachev said that environmentalists hoped Chakurov would behave with dignity and reject the project due to environmental reasons – “the only ones objectively giving him this opportunity”.