German firm ready to takeover Antam's Ferro nickel project
Thursday, May 4 2000 - 04:00 AM WIB
A German firm backed up by a banking and insurance group called Hermes is ready to takeover the development of the Ferro nickel III project of the state-owned gold and nickel mining company PT Aneka Tambang (Antam) from its main contractor, Japan's Mitsui, according to the Gamma weekly magazine.
The weekly quoted a source as saying that Antam president Teddy A. Sumanagara had sent a letter to Germany's Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau Frankfurt (KfW) to get confirmation whether the German group was ready to take domestic political risk.
The development of Antam's Ferro nickel III project was supposed to be already started by Mitsui in the second semester of 1998 and to be completed in 2001. The project was supposed to double Antam's production capacity. But until now, the US$250 million project had not been started.
Gamma said that Mitsui faced funding difficulty from the Japan Exim bank because its proposal for the government of Indonesia to guarantee the project was rejected.
The delay could potentially cause Antam to suffer some $30 million in losses. (*)