By Reuters Staff
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Feb 5 (Reuters) - Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd said on Friday that its wholly-owned Pebble Limited Partnership and the unit’s former chief executive officer had been served with subpoenas.
The subpoenas to produce documents is related to a grand jury investigation apparently involving recordings of private conversations regarding the Pebble mine project.
Tom Collier, CEO of Pebble Limited Partnership, the company trying to develop Alaska’s Pebble Mine project, had resigned in September after his comments on elected and regulatory officials in the U.S. state were covertly videotaped and released by an environmental activist group.
and is republished here by permission.
Robin Samuelsen still recalls his first meeting about the prospective Pebble Mine. It was around 2005 or 2006, in Dillingham, Alaska. Listening to an early plan for developing a copper and gold mine in the spawning grounds of Bristol Bay’s abundant salmon, this Curyung tribal chief and commercial fisherman quickly made up his mind. “You’ll kill off our salmon,” Samuelsen remembers saying, adding: “I’ll be up there to stop you.”
“You’ll kill off our salmon. I’ll be up there to stop you.”
More than 15 years later, in November 2020, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) denied the Pebble Mine a key permit, a sharp setback for the mine though not the first. Already, the mine’s developer, Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP), has filed an appeal challenging that decision. PLP was joined by the State of Alaska, which, in an unusual move, filed its own appeal. Both appeals are currently under review.
Subpoenas issued to Pebble developer, former executive February 11th |
The U.S. Department of Justice has issued a grand jury subpoena to the developer of the controversial proposed Pebble mine and the company s former chief executive as part of an investigation involving already-disclosed private conversations about the project, according to a statement from the project s parent company.
The Pebble Limited Partnership and its former CEO, Tom Collier, have each been served with a subpoena issued by the U.S. Attorney s Office for the District of Alaska, according to an online statement from Northern Dynasty Minerals, Pebble s parent company on Friday.
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Canada-based Northern Dynasty Minerals issued a statement on Friday, Feb. 5, acknowledging that it is cooperating with a federal grand jury investigation after its subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership and former CEO Tom Collier received subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Alaska. The subpoenas request documents as part of an investigation “apparently involving previously disclosed recordings of private conversations regarding the Pebble Project,” the company said in its release.
The documents sought are likely related to the content of the Pebble Tapes and the resulting fallout of the recorded video calls in which Collier made statements that reportedly contradicted his own Congressional testimony. In the videos, released in September, Collier was speaking to environmentalists posing as potential Pebble Mine investors.
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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 10, 2021 / Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. (TSX:NDM)(NYSE:NAK) ( Northern Dynasty or the Company ) reports that its recently submitted Request for Appeal ( RFA ) of a federal permitting decision concerning Alaska s Pebble Project challenges a key finding of significant degradation .
Prepared and submitted by the Company s 100%-owned US-based subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership (the Pebble Partnership ), the RFA argues the US Army Corps of Engineers ( USACE ) finding that the proposed copper-gold-molybdenum-silver-rhenium mine would cause significant degradation to a local watershed is:
inconsistent with the law and
Clean Water Act (CWA) regulations;
arbitrary and unsupported by the administrative record, including the Final Environmental Impact Statement ( FEIS ) for the Pebble Project; and,