As Roy Hill celebrates the loading of it’s first shipment on the MV Anangel Explorer, Gina Rinehart has hit back at the “relentless negativity” of the media.
The milestone, announced yesterday, is more than a month ahead of the owners’ expectations and Hancock Prospecting and Roy Hill together with its partners, Marubeni, POSCO and China Steel are expected to hold a ceremony on a day with suitable tides for a major vessel, later this week to farewell the MV Anangel Explorer and to celebrate this historic occasion.
“Despite the many media critics and their relentless negativity, we have now loaded a ship of Roy Hill low phosphorous ore, the next step in the exciting story of the Roy Hill Project,” Roy Hill and Hancock Prospecting chairman Mrs Rinehart said.
“This achievement is due to the hard-work and persistence of the small team at Hancock Prospecting and the Roy Hill team and the great support of our partners, financiers, ECAs and suppliers. All people who contributed to Roy Hill should be congratulated for this outstanding performance, one of the fastest construction projects for a mega project, in Australia’s history. Sincere congratulations from me”.
Media reports have suggested the Roy Hill project was a contributor to the plummeting iron ore prices.
“Where are the media reports about the many companies who were pleased to get work from Roy Hill? Surely this is of far more importance to Australia than the media’s glee about so called time slippages. Yet which topic has had intense media repetition?,” Mrs Rinehart said.
Hancock Prospecting executive director Tad Watroba said the “constant attacks” were unfortunate.
“This is a very happy day for everyone associated with Roy Hill. It is unfortunate that constant attacks blaming Roy Hill for the iron ore price falls over the last two years even though Roy Hill was not even exporting undermine any remaining faith in the accuracy of the media,” Mr Watroba said.
“As we have constantly said, this ill-informed, headline-seeking media barrage, ignores the fact that Roy Hill is selling iron ore to partners with deals done years ago, and ignores that Roy Hill won’t ramp up to large capacity tonnage even next year, while incredibly ignoring the growth of ore exports from Brazil and other Australian suppliers.
“With more than 90% of Roy Hill’s production secured under long-term contracts very little ore will actually enter the spot iron ore market.”
Roy Hill CEO Barry Fitzgerald said the project delivered a Lost Time Injury Frequency Rate performance 10 times better than the WA mining industry average.
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