Finnish metals group Outokumpu is seeking a partner to share the costs involved in re-opening its Tara zinc mine in Co Meath.
The company's vice-president of operations, Mr Ville Sipila, said yesterday it wanted to share the expense of maintaining and running the mine and had held "some discussions" with prospective partners.
"To open, we would need some other company with us, because it needs quite a lot of money to make the south-west extension and for the many other things we need to do there before we decide," he told Reuters at a zinc industry conference in the US.
The Finnish company said in January that a review of Tara's operations had shown that the mine was viable in the long term, after investments of between €70- €80 million (£55-£63 million). The investment would include acquisition of the Bula ore body.
News that the company needed a partner to help it to reopen the mine came as a surprise to SIPTU, the main union at the mine. It said it was concerned, as the need for a partner had not been among the conditions set down so far for re-opening the mine. "There's been nothing in what we've been told or interpreted so far to say that condition was there," SIPTU's Meath branch secretary, Mr Christy McQuillan, said.
SIPTU had understood that the company was talking to financial institutions about raising the money needed to invest in and re-open the mine, he said.
However, Tara Mines played down the suggestion that the mine would not reopen without investment from a partner. "As far as we at Tara are concerned, it is not a precondition of reopening that we have a partner," human resources manager, Mr John Kelly, told The Irish Times last night.
But he said that financing remained an issue and the company was looking at various options, among them the issue of partnership.
Mr Sipila said that Outokumpu still needed at least until mid-March to decide what to do with Tara, Europe's largest zinc mine, which closed last November forcing its 700 workers into temporary redundancy. "We are checking the situation [at Tara] now and maybe middle March we will announce what we will do," Mr Sipila said.
