Hearing the Reko Diq lease case on Thursday, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry said that additional documents were used to tamper with the original form of the Reko Diq agreement.
A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court was hearing the case consisting of identical petitions filed against the federal government’s decision to lease out gold and copper mines in Reko Diq in Balochistan’s Chagai district to Tethyan Copper Company (TCC) — a Canadian and Chilean consortium of Barrick Gold and Antofagasta Minerals.
Reko Diq sits over the popular Tethyan copper belt and is known to have the fifth largest deposits of gold and copper in the world. The chief justice enquired what issues sprang up after the passing of several years that new documents had to be released.
Counsel for TCC, Khalid Anwar, said BHP had not done anything unlawful, nor had it pressurised anyone into signing the joint agreement.
Anwar added that the Balochistan governor had given permission to the chairman of Balochistan Development Authority (BDA) for the joint agreement. The counsel said it was not the Balochistan government, but BHP, which was being plundered, as it had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for mineral exploration. In his remarks, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry said additional documents had been used to tamper with the agreement’s original form.
He added that in the joint agreement, the BDA, not the provincial governor, was a party. The chief justice moreover inquired the need for delegating powers held by the provincial governor to the BDA chairman, observing that from 1993 to 2000, no issue was reported in the Reko Diq agreement.
