Newmont asks Walhi to be transparent in its surveys

The management of PT Newmont Minahasa Raya, a gold mine operator in North Sulawesi, has urged the local chapter of the Indonesian environmental group Walhi to be transparent in their environmental survey so as not to mislead the public.

The gold mine operator said that Walhi should tell the public how they carried the surveys and obtained samples so that the public would be well informed about the validity of the surveys.

According to Newmont, an independent team established by the government-sanctioned environmental impact supervisory agency (Bapedal), announced recently that the surveys carried out by Walhi on the impact of the company's tailings did not meet the scientific standards.

The team, which is led by a person proposed by Walhi and consists of noted experts from Sam Ratulangi University and other institutions, also categorized the surveys carried by Walhi as not valid.

The mining operator, a subsidiary of the United States-based Newmont Corporation, said Walhi's surveys, which concluded that the company's undersea waste disposal area in the Buyat Bay near its mining site in Minahasa posed a serious impact to the environment, have severely damaged the company's image and reputation.

In other development, Newmont said that the company was recently informed that Walhi had also tested urine, nails and hair of several Buyat residents at an American laboratory in its surveys.

"If the report is true. Walhi should transparently disclose how the samples were obtained, the protocol of its surveys and the name of the laboratory," Newmont Minahasa Raya's president Rick Ness. " If Walhi did not transparently announce them to the public, we doubted whether Walhi's statement was based on fact or just accusation, not based on scientific ground." (*)