Kalagadi mining contract awarded

MURRAY & Roberts (M&R) subsidiary Murray & Roberts Cementation has been awarded a R4.8 billion five-year contract mining project for Kalagadi Manganese in the Northern Cape. The news caused the listed construction and engineering group’s shares on the JSE to gain as much as 7.1 percent to R14.60 before being quoted up 6.9 percent at R14.57. Kalagadi Manganese has been exploring for manganese in the Kalahari Basin. The three farms on which the company holds new order mining rights are believed to hold some 960 million tons of manganese ore. Ed Jardim, a spokesman for the listed construction and engineering group, said yesterday that the infrastructure for the mine had already been installed and the award to Murray & Roberts Cementation was for the mining of the manganese on a contract basis. Henry Laas, the group chief executive of M&R, said this contract award would further bolster the recent growth in the group’s global underground mining platform order book. – Roy Cokayne