Pacific Wildcat Resources Corp (PWCRF)

[Rocketred]

In March, British junior Cortec Mining's team of lawyers and those of the Kenyan government will each be requested to present their post-hearing submissions to the Dubai-based arbitral court assigned to settle their dispute. Placed under the guidance of the ICSID, the World Bank group's arbitral arm, the court will be ruling on the validity of Nairobi's decision to cancel Cortec's Mrima Hill niobium mining permit (AMI 345). After each party has submitted its report, the arbitrators will have three months to issue their verdict, meaning the case should be resolved sometime in July.

To help with their decision, the three arbitrators, Canadian judge Ian Binnie, Australian lawyer Kanaga Dharmananda and French lawyer Brigitte Stern, will need to address several questions raised by Nairobi's representatives during the hearing held in Dubai in late January. The legal team, made up of lawyers from DLA Piper and its Kenyan partner Iseme Kamau & Maema Advocates, reportedly queried whether the complaint filed by Cortec, a subsidiary of Canadian frim Pacific Wildcat Resources Corp, was legitimate. Nairobi's stance is that Cortec's mining permit had never been a valid one because it was awarded under controversial circumstances during President Mwai Kibaki's tenure. It was therefore duly cancelled in 2014 by the government of his successor Uhuru Kenyatta, who came into office in 2013. Taking an opposite view, Cortec esteems that it had been expropriated after investing approximately $60 million in the permit.

Kenya's commissioner of mines when Cortec's permit was withdrawn, Moses Masibo, was questioned in Dubai by the mining junior's lawyers Sam Luttrell, Ben Luscombe and Audley Sheppard, partners at Clifford Chance in Perth and London. The minister of mines at the time of the disputed events, Najib Balala, did not appear before the court.

Cortec's senior management, namely the company chairman Donald O'Sullivan and chief executive David Anderson, but also several technical experts who had worked on the Mrima Hill project, also bore witness at the arbitral hearing in January.

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