The Tormin minerals sands mine on the West Coast near Vredendal that generates close to 97% of all revenue for controversial Australian mining company Mineral Commodities Ltd .
MRC is hoping to extract titanium from coastal dunes at Xolobeni in Transkei. The company earned an after-tax profit of R130 million from mining South Africa’s mineral-rich West Coast beaches last year. Caruso’s reply had been unequivocal, De Villiers reported: “It was quite a fiery meeting. Caruso said outright he’d not agree to offering a reward, and for the rest he harangued me before closing me down again, saying I should table the questions.”in 2016, MRC said it was “not in a position to comment with any authority on the incident” but any claims it was in any way implicated were “simply unfounded”.
De Villiers also asked for clarity on an apparent contradiction in MRC’s 2017 annual report: the company had announced in 2016 that it was divesting from its Xolobeni mining rights but at the same time apparently remained interested in mining there.At this year’s meeting, De Villiers and Colette Rhoding, a retired lecturer with an interest in environmental issues, who also held a proxy, again posed questions.
But, he said, the annual meeting “is not a forum for one shareholder or proxy holder to dominate such questions”. “Given the confidential nature of some of the answers, the company sought to obtain a confidentiality agreement with the shareholder [for whom De Villiers held a proxy] … This is common practice amongst all public listed companies prior to engaging with any counterparty in the provision of confidential information.