BL Premium reports that gold producer Pan African Resources (PAR) arrested about 4,000 illegal miners at its underground operations in Mpumalanga over the past year.

The mining group was recently in the headlines after police detained 494 illegal miners as they resurfaced from its Sheba mine in Barberton. “We’ve had an ongoing problem with illegal miners in Barberton because of the terrain and the nature of the ore body. It’s a mountainous area with visible gold and over 140 years of legal mining, so access for illegal miners was easy to look for,” explained PAR’s Hethen Hira. He indicated that PAR had arrested between 150 and 200 people every week over the past year. Regarding last week’s operation, he said the local police just could not cope, so the company asked the SA Police Service (SAPS) to extend its Vala Umgodi (‘close the hole’) operation to Barberton. When presenting its interim results in May, PAR said that increasing gold theft, including by employees colluding with illegal miners and community members, had made operating costs at some of Barberton’s business units unsustainable, resulting in the retrenchment of 244 mineworkers and a reduction in gold production. With a direct workforce of 3,759, the PAR mines are the largest employer in the region. Gold theft has escalated across the SA mining industry over the past 18 months due to record gold prices.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Jacob Webster at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)

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