Combined Reports. The Moscow Times. Saturday, Dec. 16,
2000. Page 10
HAVANA — Metals giant Norilsk Nickel is ready to provide the $300
million necessary to finish building a nickel ore plant in Cuba that was started
by the former Soviet Union and its allies, a senior Norilsk manager said
Thursday.
The processing plant in Las Camariocas in the east of the Caribbean island
was started by the Soviet Union and its former allies from the Comecon economic
block in the 1980s, but left unfinished after the collapse of the Soviet empire
in 1991.
"This project needs $300 million. We are ready to invest the money,"
said Dzhonson Khagazheyev, the general director of the Norilsk Mining Company,
Norilsk's core unit.
"We believe that we could finish building this plant in three, maximum
four years and make it operational by that time."
Khagazheyev came to Havana with a group of businessmen accompanying
President Vladimir Putin on an official Russian visit to Cuba, the first since
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited in 1989.
Khagazheyev said that Norilsk was ready to process all or half of the nickel
carbonate to be produced by the Las Camariocas plant at its spare smelting
facilities located on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia.
"What we are proposing is production sharing, which will be beneficial
to both parties," he said.
Khagazheyev said that the negotiations on Las Camariocas have dragged on for
two years, because Russia missed out on a period in the middle of the 1990s when
Cuba needed investments badly and started looking elsewhere.
"Norilsk was unable to invest money in 1997, but when we found it by
the end of 1998, we had lost good conditions. Canadian firms became interested
in Cuba and Cubans looked at them favorably," he said.
Toronto-based Sherritt International Corp. is involved in nickel mining in
Cuba.
Khagazheyev said Norilsk enjoys support from the Russian government and
Putin himself, who saw in the project a chance to recover some of Cuba's huge
Soviet-era debt, which is estimated to be around $27 billion.
The debt recovery scheme was mentioned last week by Vladimir Potanin, head
of Interros holding, the flagship of which is Norilsk Nickel. Potanin did not
elaborate on the link between the debt and his company's investment in the Cuba
plant, but the newspaper Kommersant laid out a framework it said Norilsk Nickel
had proposed.
The newspaper said that under the scheme, Norilsk Nickel would form a joint
venture with the Cuban state-owned General Nickel Co. to build the plant.
General Nickel's share of the profits would go directly to the Russian
government to pay Cuba's debt.
Even if Norilsk were unable to persuade Cuba that it would benefit from
Russia's participation in the project, Khagazheyev said, it would not prevent
Norilsk from pursuing its strategic plans of raising nickel output.
"We are not going to lose our niche in world nickel production. We have
projects covering deposits both in Russia and elsewhere. We will continue
working on this with Cuba or without it," he said.
"But if we act as partners, we can save a lot of money, several dozen
million [U.S. dollars]." | 