The battle for control of the huge Manono lithium deposit in central Africa, possibly the world’s biggest, has been portrayed as a fight between China’s Zijin Mining and Australia’s AVZ Minerals, however Suzhou Cath Energy Technologies – owned by China’s battery giant CATL and Pei Zhenhua – has a 24% stake in AVZ, while Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt also has a holding, which suggests that Chinese entities will retain major involvement or could even end up controlling the project once the complex legal fight over ownership ends, a report by the South China Morning Post on Sunday says.
AVZ announced four years it had found about 400 million tonnes of lithium at Manono in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but development has been held up by Zijin’s claim of a 15% stake in Dathcom Mining, the joint venture that owns the site set up by AVZ and Cominiere, the DRC’s state mining company, and a separate row over another 15% stake, it said.
Read the full report: SCMP.
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