Work halts on Mobilong Mining Project for over 18 months

The permit holder, C&K Mining, is reported to have sold the majority of its shares to a Chinese-American investor whose activity is yet to take off on the project site.

The second Cameroon International Mining Conference and Exhibition, CIMEC, has come and gone with organisers counting blessings for its successes.

However, among the projects that have propelled the country to fame, attracting investors’ attention is the Mobilong Diamond project, lodged in the East Region of Cameroon.

Information gathered from officials of the Delegation of Mines, Industry and Technological Development, MINMIDT, for the East Region, present at CIMEC 2015 at the Yaounde Conference Centre indicate that the project has been on a standstill for over 18 months. The only thing that indicates the project’s existence in the area is the fleet of working equipment, sources say.

Quizzed on how soon work will resume on the project site, Cameroon Tribune was told that it will depend on government and the new Chinese-American investor, Mr Yang. The new project explorer is taking its time to evaluate the stakes and challenges of a project whose first managers were grilled in a court in Seoul, South Korea on the feasibility of the mineral deposits that reportedly employed 4,000 people.

“I was invited to court in Seoul in 2014 to proof that Mobilong was not a paper project,” Paul Ntep Gweth, former Coordinator of the Small-scale Mining Support and Promotion Framework Unit, told Cameroon Tribune. He maintains that Mobilong was one of Cameroon’s potential that is full of huge mineral deposits.

The Cameroonian government in 2010 issued a mining license to the Cameroon and Korea Mining Company, C&K Mining; a joint venture company between Cameroon and Korean businessmen. Investments were evaluated at one billion US Dollars (about FCFA 597,826,586,654) for a period of over 25 years. The mining field was discovered in 1940s by the United Nations after unearthing over 340 carats.

During a presentation on November 2014 in Douala, the Chief of Service in the Department of Mining, MINMIDT, Serge Hervé Boyogueno, stated that the Mobilong diamond deposit was full of potential evaluated at over 750 million carats. Experts however say Mobilong boasts of two types of deposits- the Aluvial which can be evaluated at over 300,000 carats of diamond and the Conglomerate (huge deposits) which remains unevaluated.