Ukrainian Prime Minister orders audit of all strategic mineral license holders
Ukraine's Ministry of Economy and the State Service of Geology and Subsoil will conduct an audit of all subsoil users who hold permits for strategically important deposits, following an order from Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.
"We plan to check who is actually working and who is simply holding licenses without extraction. Such sites must either produce results or go back to auction for honest investors," she wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
As reported, in mid-July this year, the Cabinet of Ministers, by Resolution No. 845, approved the lists of minerals and components of strategic and critical importance, as well as lists of subsoil plots (mineral deposits) of strategic and/or critical importance that will be offered for use through auctions or production-sharing agreements (PSAs).
The first list of strategically important minerals and components includes 11: aluminum, beryllium, copper, nickel, niobium, strontium, tantalum, titanium, uranium, and zirconium ores, as well as fluorite. Together with critically important minerals, the total list contains 28 items.
As for deposits, the list of those to be auctioned includes 60 sites, while 26 will be offered under PSAs. Of these, there is one vanadium ore deposit, one lithium ore deposit, two potassium salt deposits, five titanium ore deposits, and 17 uranium ore deposits.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced back in February this year that Ukraine had begun an audit of its subsoil resources as part of preparations for a memorandum with the United States, and that the government intended to protect businesses that are legally developing them.
"There are quite a few license holders in Ukraine. This entire process (signing a memorandum on mineral development with the United States) will help us in any case. First, all of our agencies, which have never engaged in such serious legal work before, will finally conduct a real audit of existing licenses. And this is already happening," the President said.
According to him, the last major mineral development projects in Ukraine took place 50–60 years ago.
"This allows us to bring order: to know what we have, how much it's worth, and who owns it. There will be decisions accordingly: what's legally owned, what's not, which licenses are active, and which are dormant. Where ownership is fair and business is engaged, we will defend them. We need that. Where licenses are dormant and someone has plundered resources, we will reclaim them. This is important for us," Zelenskyy added.
Svyrydenko recently said that the practical work of the Ukraine-U.S. Reconstruction Investment Fund, created in the spring–summer of this year to focus on critical minerals, will begin in September.