Liquidator of Botswana nickel miner sounds cash shortage warning
The liquidator of Botswana’s state-owned nickel assets, Nigel Dixon-Warren, is in talks with a number of parties over the sale of the mines and smelter. But he has warned of the need of an urgent cash injection from the government to prevent abandoning the mothballed mines and losing any chance of selling them. The liquidation process over the past two years has entailed unscrambling years of mismanagement, misreporting and undercapitalisation of BCL Group, one of the key mining assets in Botswana, which has resulted in a bitter legal feud with Norilsk Nickel over the $277m sale of the Russian miner’s SA assets. The Botswana government, which has billions of pula’s worth of exposure to the BCL Group, had injected a refundable 1-billion pula into the company to assist the preparation of the assets for sale or orderly closure in the first year of liquidation but has notified Dixon-Warren it would not repeat the exercise. “The consequence of this is that the liquidator has been forced,...
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