Newmont denies pollution charges at Minahasa mine site

Environmentalists punctuated Newmont Mining Corp's annual meeting Wednesday with outside protests and claims of pollution and unresponsiveness to local communities near its gold mines, Dow Jones Newswires reported Thursday.

But in a question-and-answer period during the meeting, Chief Executive Wayne Murdy countered the claims, charging that the environmentalists' information was incorrect.

Diana Ruiz, mining campaign coordinator for Project Underground in Berkeley, California, said that 2.8 million tons of toxic waste had been dumped by Newmont in a bay near its processing plant for the Minahasa Mine in North Sulawesi province and that the dumpings had hurt the fishing industry and caused skin rashes for people in the area.

Murdy said that the dumped tailings - the crushed rock left over after the gold is removed from the ore - that are dumped are nontoxic. Independent studies show they have had no measurable impact on the fishing in the bay, he said. And skin rashes of local inhabitants are a result of poor sanitation, not the tailings disposal, he added.

Murdy also disputed Ruiz's claims that the company hasn't been working with local communities in planning the closure of the Minahasa Mine. That closure will take several years, and the company has set aside substantial amounts of money for it, he said.

Murdy also stressed that Newmont plans to be in Indonesia, where it runs the large copper and gold Batu Hijau Mine on the island of Sumbawa in West Nusa Tenggara, for decades, and it wants to make the Minahasa Mine a model for responsible mine closure. (*)