Richards Bay Minerals (RBM) and community stakeholders have reached an agreement to support enhanced governance and controls of community trusts, together with greater transparency. This agreement signifies the parties’ commitment to working together towards modernising the community trusts and to ensuring that the trusts achieve their objective of delivering broad based benefits for members of the host communities. Following the signing of the agreement, RBM has released over R130 million to the community trusts established for each of the communities surrounding the mining and smelter operation.
In 2009, as part of its BEE transaction, RBM established community trusts for its four host communities to receive dividend payments for the purpose of supporting broad-based community upliftment.
RBM managing director, Werner Duvenhage said: “This is a major milestone. The contribution RBM makes to the communities through these funds will be put to achieving its intended purpose, which is to directly support local economic development in the communities. We are grateful for the support and collaboration of the Amakhosi, provincial and national governments, and other stakeholders. With this agreement, all parties have come together to commit to long-term modernisation of the trusts for the benefit of the host communities.
“With the agreement in place, we believe that together with visible improvements on the safety and security front and support from the provincial and national governments and host communities, including reaching an earlier agreement with the Sokhulu Youth Forum, RBM has made good progress on the core issues that have kept our business closed over the past several weeks.
Through it all, we remained committed to restarting once the safety situation improves, and we will now begin the process to restart operations.”
RBM has now commenced the process of restarting operations and will reach full operational capacity as soon as possible.
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