KHUJAND, July 14, 2002, Asia-Plus — After being closed for several months, open joint-stock company (OJSC), ore refinery Adrasman in the Sughd province, resumed its work on July 14.
Speaking in an interview with Asia-Plus, the newly appointed head of joint-stock company (JSC) Konimansour, Nurlan Alimbetov, said that a court case pitting Kazakh company North Time, which invested $20 million in the ore refinery Adrasman, against another Kazakh company, KazInvest-Mineral, which assumed the 100 percent ownership interest in the or refinery, in a court in Almaty, Kazakhstan had ended with amicable agreement.
Under the agreement, 74 percent of shares in the ore refinery were transferred to North Time that allowed rehabilitating the enterprise that had not been in operation for several months, the Konimansour head said.
According to him, North Time was forces to file suit against KazInvest-Mineral in order to protect its investments and also because KazInvest-Mineral had been concealing the real situation at the ore refinery from it and had not admitted it to management of the enterprise.
The work has been resumed and the ore refinery has already got the first tranche to repay its tax and wage debts, Alimbetov said.
We will recall that workers have begun to quit their jobs at the Adrasman ore refinery because of shutdown of the enterprise and delays in paying wages.
The ore refinery director general Barot Karimov, told Asia-Plus that 564 persons had worked with the enterprise since January 2007, when the ore refinery resumed its work, while at present only 455 persons are on the list of the enterprise employees. According to him, both miners and other specialists have left their jobs at the enterprise. “When the ore refinery was operating, miners were receiving on average 1,200 somonis per month,” the director general said, noting that during winter months, the enterprise stood idle because of electricity shortages.
The ore refinery had not been in operation since May because of lack of circulating assets. According to Karimov, the enterprise needs considerable financial inflows to maintain nonstop production.
The Adrasman ore refinery was purchased by Kazakhstan’s KazInvest-Mineral in July 2006 for 11 million somonis. Established in 1967, the Adrasman ore refinery is engaged in mining and processing of lead ore for producing led-silver concentrate. The plant’s rated capacity is more than 650,000 tons of ore a year.
