An initial hearing of a class action against mining giant Rio Tinto over the toxic legacy of the Panguna copper mine on the autonomous island of Bougainville has been held in Papua New Guinea.

The lawsuit against Rio Tinto and its subsidiary Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) is seeking compensation, expected to be in the billions of dollars, for what plaintiffs allege is historic mismanagement of the massive open copper-and-gold mine between 1972 and 1989.

More than 5000 claimants backed by anonymous investors are seeking damages for the destruction that sparked a 10-year-long civil war.

The Panguna mine closed in 1989 after anger about pollution and the unequal distribution of profits sparked a landowner rebellion. As many as 20,000 people — or 10 percent of Bougainville’s population — are estimated to have died in the violence that followed between pro-inependence rebels and PNG.

Although a peace process was brokered in 2001 with New Zealand support, deep political divisions remain and there has never been remediation for Panguna’s environmental and psychological scars.

The initial hearing for the lawsuit took place on Wednesday, a day ahead of schedule, at the National Court in Port Moresby, said Matthew Mennilli, a partner at Sydney-based Morris Mennilli.

Mennilli, who is from one of two law firms acting on behalf of the plaintiffs, said he was unable to provide further details as court orders had not yet been formally entered.

A defence submitted
Rio Tinto did not respond to specific questions regarding this week’s hearing, but said in a statement on September 23 it had submitted a defence and would strongly defend its position in the case.

The lawsuit is made up by the majority of villagers in the affected area of Bougainville, an autonomous province within PNG, situated some 800km east of the capital Port Moresby.

At least 71 local clan leaders support the claim, with the lead claimant named as former senior Bougainville political leader and chief of the Basking Taingku clan Martin Miriori.

The lawsuit is being bankrolled by Panguna Mine Action, a limited liability company that stands to reap between 20-40 percent of any payout depending on how long the case takes, according to litigation funding documents cited by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

While the lawsuit has support from a large number of local villagers, some observers fear it could upset social cohesion on Bougainville and potentially derail another long-standing remediation effort.

The class action is running in parallel with an independent assessment of the mine’s legacy, supported by human rights groups and the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG), and funded by Rio Tinto.

Rio Tinto agreed in 2021 to take part in the Panguna Mine Legacy Impact Assessment after the Melbourne-based Human Rights Law Centre filed a complaint with the Australian government, on behalf of Bougainville residents.

Legacy of destruction
The group said the Anglo-Australian mining giant has failed to address Panguna’s legacy of destruction, including the alleged dumping of more than a billion tonnes of mine waste into rivers that continues to affect health, the environment and livelihoods.

The assessment, which is being done by environmental consulting firm Tetra Tech Coffey, includes extensive consultation with local communities and the first phase of the evaluation is expected to be delivered next month.

ABG President Ishmael Toroama has called the Rio Tinto class action the highest form of treason and an obstacle to the government’s economic independence agenda.

“This class action is an attack on Bougainville’s hard-fought unity to date,” he said in May.

In February, the autonomous government granted Australian-listed Bougainville Copper a five-year exploration licence to revive the Panguna mine site.

The Bougainville government is hoping its reopening will fund independence. In a non-binding 2019 referendum — which was part of the 2001 peace agreement — 97.7 percent of the island’s inhabitants voted for independence.

PNG leaders resist independence
But PNG leaders have resisted the result, fearful that by granting independence it could encourage breakaway movements in other regions of the volatile Pacific island country.

Former New Zealand Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae was appointed last month as an independent moderator to help the two parties agree on terms of a parliamentary vote needed to ratify the referendum.

In response to the class action, Rio Tinto said last month its focus remained on “constructive engagement and meaningful action with local stakeholders” through the legacy assessment.

The company said it was “seeking to partner with key stakeholders, such as the ABG and BCL, to design and implement a remedy framework.”

Copyright ©2015-2024, BenarNews. Republished with the permission of BenarNews.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

High in the forested mountains of Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville Island lies an abandoned, kilometer-wide crater cut deep into the earth.

Formerly one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines, the open pit now serves as an unsightly monument to the environmental and social chaos that underground riches can create.

Run for years by a subsidiary of Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto, the Panguna mine earned millions for Papua New Guinea (PNG) and helped bankroll its newfound independence. But it also poured waste into local waterways and fuelled anger among locals who felt robbed of the profits.

When an armed uprising ultimately shuttered the mine in 1989, the impoverished island was left reeling.

Nearly three decades later, in late 2022, human rights activists, the local government, and the mine’s former operators joined forces to produce a definitive assessment of the mine’s toxic legacy.

Their report, due to be released later this month, will become the basis for negotiations aimed at getting the mining companies to finally clean up the mess and compensate affected communities.

But its supporters now worry their efforts will be undermined by a class-action lawsuit launched in May against the mine’s erstwhile operators. The legal effort is being championed by former rebel leaders — and backed by anonymous offshore investors who stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars if it succeeds.

Worldwide litigation boom
The lawsuit is part of a worldwide boom in litigation financing that seeks to take multinational companies to task for ecological or social damage while potentially reaping a fortune for lawyers and funders.

Critics in Bougainville worry the lawsuit will reopen old wounds at a time when the island is making a push to break free of Papua New Guinea and become the world’s newest sovereign nation. Many Bougainvilleans are hoping to reopen the mine, using its wealth to fund their own independence this time around.

The region’s government and many local leaders believe the class action could put the mine’s revival at risk. There are also concerns the lawsuit would leave many Bougainvilleans empty handed, while the anonymous foreign investors would walk away with a significant share of the payout.

Unlike the official assessment, which seeks to identify everyone who needs to be compensated, the class action will only share its winnings — which could potentially be in the billions of dollars — with the locals who have signed on. Others will get nothing.

“There’s already fragmentation in the community and families are already divided,” said Theonila Roka Matbob, who represents the area around Panguna in the local Parliament and has helped lead the government-backed assessment process as a minister in the Autonomous Bougainville government.

She speaks from personal experience. The chief litigant in the class-action lawsuit, Martin Miriori, is her uncle. The two are no longer on speaking terms.

A losing deal
Gouged from Bougainville’s lush volcanic heart, the Panguna mine in its heyday supplied as much as 45 percent of PNG’s export revenue, providing it with the financial means to achieve independence from Australia in 1975.

The windfall, however, did not extend to Bougainvilleans themselves. Ethnically and culturally distinct from the rest of PNG’s population, they saw Panguna as a symbol of external domination.

The mine delivered only a miserly 2-percent share of its profits to their island — along with years of environmental havoc.

During the 17 years of Panguna’s operation — from 1972 to 1989 — over a billion metric tons of toxic mine waste and electric blue copper runoff flooded rivers that flowed downstream towards communities of subsistence farmers. The result was poisoned drinking water, infertile land, and children who were drowned or injured trying to cross engorged waterways.

In 1989, enraged Bougainville locals launched an armed rebellion against the PNG government. The mine was shut down, closing off a vital source of revenue for the national government in Port Moresby.

A brutal civil war raged on for nearly a decade, leaving more than 15,000 people dead, while a naval blockade by PNG’s military obliterated the island’s economy.

A peace deal in 2000 granted Bougainville substantial autonomy. But nearly a quarter-century later, the legacy of Panguna and the war it provoked is still deeply felt.

Few paved roads, bridges
There are few paved roads and bridges in the island’s interior. Residents earn a modest living through cocoa and coconut farming, or by unregulated artisanal mining in and around the abandoned Panguna crater.

Rivers polluted by years of runoff are still an otherworldly shade of milky blue.

At least 300,000 people are estimated to live on Bougainville, including as many as 15,000 who live downstream of the mine. Of those, some 4500 have joined Miriori — Roka’s estranged uncle and a tribal leader whose brother, Joseph Kabui, served as the first president of autonomous Bougainville — in seeking restitution through the class-action suit.

“We’ve got to make people happy,” Miriori said. “They’ve lost their land forever, environment forever. Their hunting grounds. Their spiritual, sacred grounds.”

While the tribal leader and former rebel is a well-known figure in Bougainville, the funders of the lawsuit are not. They have managed to keep their identities secret in part because the company behind the suit, Panguna Mine Action LLC, is registered on Nevis, a small Caribbean island that does not require companies to publicly disclose their shareholders and directors.

Miriori declined to comment on who was behind the company, saying, “I will not tell you where the funding is based … you can source that from our people down there [in Australia].”

James Sing, an Australian based in New York, is Panguna Mine Action’s chief public representative. He initially agreed to an interview, but later referred reporters back to a London-based public relations agency, Sans Frontières Associates.

The agency declined to reveal Panguna Mine Action’s investors.

Litigation funding documents obtained by OCCRP, however, shed some light on the history of the case. The documents show that Panguna Mine Action began to investigate the possibility of a class-action suit as early as July 2021.

The Bougainvillean claimants, led by Miriori, were formally brought into an agreement with the company and its Australian and PNG lawyers in November 2022. The suit was publicly announced this May.

Handsome profit
The lawsuit’s investors stand to profit handsomely from any eventual settlement: Panguna Mine Action is poised to receive a cut of 20 to 40 percent of any payout resulting from the suit, with the percentage increasing the longer the process takes, the funding documents show.

In interviews and statements, both Miriori and Panguna Mine Action have put the potential value of any award in the billions of dollars.

The lawsuit’s financiers defend their substantial share of the potential benefits as standard practice.

“The costs of launching and running the class action against a global miner are significant, and almost certainly could not be met from within Bougainville without funding from an external party,” the company said in its statement.

Panguna Mine Action added it would bear sole responsibility for costs if the lawsuit is unsuccessful.

According to Michael Russell, a Sydney-based class action defence lawyer, such funding arrangements are typical in the burgeoning world of litigation finance, where investors seek out cases that promote virtuous social causes while offering huge potential payoffs.

A similar case is unfolding in Latin America, where more than 720,000 Brazilians are seeking $46.5 billion as part of a gargantuan class action against mining giant BHP and its local subsidiary for their role in a 2015 dam collapse.

In such cases, funders can justify walking away with significant cuts of any winnings because of the substantial risk they face of losing their investment if a case fails, Russell said.

Such cases were rarely initiated at the grassroots level by the victims themselves, he added.

“Most of the time, either the plaintiff firms or the funders will be the catalyst for a claim,” he said. “They are very alert to opportunities.”

Rival restitution plans
Government officials including Miriori’s niece, Roka, say the class-action case, which is due to hold opening arguments in October, threatens to derail the ongoing impact assessment aimed at calculating the full cost of the mine’s environmental impact and developing recommendations for addressing the damage.

The assessment, which counts community members among its stakeholders and bills itself as an independent review, is supported by Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, which has hailed the project as “an important step” towards rectifying the mine’s devastating impact on thousands of Bougainvilleans.

However, while Rio Tinto and Bougainville Copper are both funding the project, they have not yet committed to paying for any compensation or cleanup. Roka said she was concerned the lawsuit could reduce the company’s willingness to engage with the process, since it could view the assessment as a tool that could be used against them in the courtroom.

Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama backs the impact assessment and has lambasted the class action suit as the work of “faceless investors . . .  taking advantage of vulnerable groups.” (His office did not respond to an interview request.)

He also expressed concern that the court proceedings threaten to “disrupt” his government’s efforts to reopen the mine, which still holds an estimated $60 billion in untapped deposits.

Bougainville’s leaders see the mine as key to securing the island’s economic future as it sets out to form an independent state — a dream that drew overwhelming public support in a 2019 referendum.

Exploration licence
Earlier this year Toroama’s government granted Bougainville Copper a five-year exploration licence for the Panguna site.

The lack of media and polling in Bougainville make it hard to measure public opinion on plans to reactivate the mine, but many locals appear to support reopening it under local control as an essential tool for achieving independence.

Bougainville Copper’s brand is still toxically associated with Rio Tinto and its past abuses, despite the fact that the international mining giant gave away its majority stake for no money in 2016.

The publicly traded company is now majority co-owned by the governments of PNG and Bougainville, and Port Moresby has pledged to hand over all its shares to the autonomous region in the near future.

Panguna Mine Action acknowledges that its effort could stand in the way of the mine’s reopening — but the company says that is a good thing.

“It is our understanding that the people of Bougainville do not wish mining to be recommenced under any circumstances or, alternatively, unless Rio Tinto and Bougainville Copper acknowledge the past, pay compensation and remediate the rivers and surrounding valley,” the company said in a statement.

Rio Tinto declined to comment. Mel Togolo, the chairman of Bougainville Copper, told OCCRP that the lawsuit was the work of “a foreign funder who no doubt is seeking a return on an investment.”

With global copper prices soaring on high demand for renewable energy and electric vehicles, the Panguna mine would be an attractive prize for both Western mining companies and firms from China, which is dramatically expanding its influence in the South Pacific.

Since a future Bougainvillean state would be economically dependent on the mine’s revenue, some have raised concerns that control of the mine could become a proxy battle for geopolitical influence in the broader region.

For his part, Miriori expressed little concern that a multibillion-dollar payout might stir resentment by reaching only a fraction of the people affected by the mine’s environmental destruction.

“Only those who signed will benefit,” he said, adding that the opportunity was made “very clear to people” through awareness campaigns.

“Those who have not signed, it’s their freedom of choice.”

Among those who did not sign is Wendy Bowara, 48, who lives in Dapera, a bleak settlement built on a hill of mine waste. Bowara said she is looking to the government-backed assessment, not the lawsuit, to deliver compensation and clean up Panguna’s toxic legacy.

“We are living on top of chemicals,” she said. “Copper concentration is high. I don’t know if the food is good to eat or if it’s healthy to drink the water.”

But while it may seem odd given her grim surroundings, Borawa says she strongly supports reopening the mine.

“It funded the independence of Papua New Guinea,” Bowara said. “Why can’t we use it to fund our own independence?”

Allan Gioni contributed reporting.

Aubrey Belford is the Pacific editor for the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting project (OCCRP). Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

About 4500 Bougainvillean residents now back a lawsuit against mining giant Rio Tinto.

This is an additional 1500 people from the autonomous Papua New Guinea region joining the action since it was filed in May this year.

Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama said the lawsuit was disappointing and was pursued by those people acting against Bougainville’s interests.

The government was not backing it in any way, shape or form, he said.

The claimants are seeking billions of dollars in compensation from Rio Tinto which operated the Panguna copper and gold mine in the 1970s and 1980s before it was forced to shut by civil war.

The mine was at the heart of that war which brought death and devastation to Bougainville over a 10-year period until 1997.

They say Rio Tinto, which was the majority shareholder in Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL) at the time, is responsible for the large scale environmental and social harm that resulted from what was one of the biggest mines in the world.

A former senior Bougainville political leader, Martin Miriori, who is the lead claimant of the class action, said the “large increase in claimants demonstrates the strength of feeling among local people that Rio Tinto and BCL must make amends for decades of environmental devastation”.

He said “this issue will not go away, as the legal action has attracted strong support, and reminded the world of the destruction caused by the mine operator’s reckless actions.”

A first court hearing is set for Port Moresby on 10 October 2024.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Community leaders around Panguna mine in the autonomous Papua New Guinea region of Bougainville want mining giant Rio Tinto to help out following recent flooding.

Rio Tinto was the owner/operator of the mine which has laid derelict for more than 30 years.

Fears of the threat from flooding in the river system near the mine have increased in recent years.

Recent heavy rain has choked rivers with mine tailings waste, resulting in several communities being swamped.

Residents have reported peoples’ homes have been inundated, water supplies and food crops compromised.

The flooding risks were highlighted in an independent report by Tetra Tech Coffey published last year.

This report was prepared as a baseline to inform an independent human rights and environmental impact assessment that launched in December 2022 and which Rio Tinto committed to fund in response to a human rights complaint by 156 local residents.

Phase 1 of the assessment is due to report in mid-2024.

Immediate funding call
Community leaders are calling for immediate funding from Rio Tinto for tangible action to address urgent health and safety issues in their communities, as well as a commitment from the company now that it will fund long-term solutions after each phase of the impact assessment.

To date, Rio Tinto has agreed to fund the human rights and environmental impact assessment only.

The chairperson of the Lower Tailings Landowners Association, Bernardine Kiraa, said: “Our communities are drowning in mine tailings waste.”

“The recent flooding damaged peoples’ houses, food crops and water sources. Women have been having trouble finding clean water to wash their babies.

“We worry about the spread of mosquitoes and disease following the flooding.”

Theonila Roka-Matbob, who is a local MP and local landowner, and who led the campaign for the environmental assessment said: “We have welcomed Rio Tinto’s commitment to assessing the impacts of the Panguna mine.”

“We know the process will be a long one. But we have been dealing with the disaster caused by the mine for decades.”

‘Always worrying about food’
“We are always worrying that the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe is not safe. We worry about levees collapsing and mine waste flooding our lands and communities,” she said.

“We need tangible action now to address urgent health and safety issues. And we need to know what Rio’s intentions are after the impact assessment – that they will stick with us and fund the long-term solutions we need.”

The legal director at Australia’s Human Rights Law Centre, Adrianne Walters, said: “Communities are being asked to be patient while the impact assessment progresses over a number of years.”

“But they also need action now and a public commitment from Rio Tinto that it will actually remedy the devastating impacts of the mine.”

“Rio Tinto’s commitment to assessing the impacts of its former mine is an important first step,” Walters said.

“The company now needs to publicly reassure communities that it is firmly committed to funding the long-term solutions that will allow them to live safely on their land.”

Rio Tinto gave away its shares in Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL) in 2016 but it has subsequently agreed to the funding of the human rights and environmental assessment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz