Minahasa ready for international arbitration
Friday, April 14 2000 - 05:00 AM WIB
The Minahasa government is ready for an international arbitration if it fails to get justice in the local court, Jerry Patilima, the defense lawyer of the Minahasa regent, was quoted as saying by Tempo Interaktif on Friday.
"We are prepared to go to any places to get justice," he said, adding that the team of the lawyers supporting the Minahasa regency in its tax dispute with PT Newmont Minahasa Raya has a representative office in New York to file the claim to the international arbitration body.
The Supreme Court has ordered to delay the execution of the local court's provisional ruling to shut down Newmont's gold mine in a tax dispute with the Minahasa regency.
The Minahasa regency sued Newmont for a total of Rp 19 billion (US$2.4 million) in taxes on the overburden it extracted from 1995 to 1998.Newmont refused to pay. It said the taxes were not included in its contract of work and that it had extracted the overburden to access the gold deposit underneath not for commercial purposed.
The company later admitted it had used some of the overburden for the construction of infrastructure facilities and agreed to pay about Rp 500 million in the local tax.
Victor Malonda, the secretary of a joint verification team established to determine the volume of the overburdent, which had commercially used by Newmont, said that he was ready to testify in the international arbitration.
He said that according to the team's finding, Newmont should only be required to pay Rp 552 million in the so called C class tax, which is imposed by the local government on mineral materials such as gravel, stones, sand and rocks. (*)