Specialist: New mining law to confirm creation of JVs - Venezuela

By Harvey Beltrán, Business News Americas

The new mining bill that Venezuela's government recently announced is ready would confirm state control over natural resources, according to a sector lawyer.

Almeida, who is a mining specialist and partner in Colombian-Venezuelan consultancy firm Incolven, added that the law means the country's mining sector will function along similar lines as the policy established in the oil sector which operates through state-private JVs.

This week, Venezuela's deputy minister of basic industries and mining (Mibam), Iván Hernández, was quoted by local press as saying that the government is ready with a new bill - rather than a reform as was previously expected - which will be presented to the national assembly for approval.

Almeida believes the new bill will include many of the changes that were expected to appear in the reform.

"Now the idea is to make partnerships between private companies and the state to develop mining and to reorganize the mining zone and its use with the goal of providing more room for what we know as mining associations or small-scale mining," she added.

In 1999 the government passed a mining law, but then Mibam presented a reform in 2006 that was passed by the national assembly in a first round. The bill then entered a period of debate between the academic sector, mining companies, the indigenous population and environmentalists, and never went into effect.

One of the reform issues that Mibam proposed was nationalizing mineral resources and substituting active mining concessions with JVs.

For its part, Venezuela's mining chamber Camiven has stated consistently that the current mining law governing the sector is good enough to manage the country's mining resources and needs no reform.

The discussion has paralyzed the sector for several months because of the lack of regulations and delays in the issue of environmental permits for several projects.