Three British mining executives who had been detained by the government of Mali have been released and are “safe and well”, days after agreeing to pay $160m to settle a tax dispute.
Resolute Mining, an Australian company, said on Thursday its chief executive, Terence Holohan, and two other employees, who had been held in the country since 9 November, have been freed.
The three executives were in Mali’s capital, Bamako, to hold discussions with mining and tax authorities.
They were detained at the end of a meeting with government officials, held to discuss tax and other state claims that the miner had previously said were “unsubstantiated”. The miner agreed to pay $160m to the Mali government this week to help resolve the tax dispute.
On Thursday, Resolute said the three Britons were released from the Economic and Financial Centre of Bamako, and “all three employees are safe and well and have departed the country”.
Holohan is based in London and has worked in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Indonesia, according to LinkedIn.
Resolute, which has a goldmine in Mali, said last week that the three employees had been treated well and were receiving support from the UK and other embassies and consulates.
Mali, which is one of Africa’s biggest gold exporters, rewrote its mining laws last year to increase state and local ownership in the industry and extract more money from international companies.
Negotiations with international mining companies have been fraught. In September, the government detained four local employees of Barrick Gold, the world’s secondlargest goldminer by market capitalisation, for four days.
Mali has been battling jihadist insurgents for more than a decade after the Libyan civil war destabilised the Sahel region to its south.
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Gold is Mali’s biggest export. It experienced a coup in 2012 and another in 2020. The current junta head, Col Assimi Goïta, then deposed another military leader in 2021.
Goïta’s regime expelled French troops that had failed to fully defeat Islamist groups and invited in the Russian mercenary Wagner group, whose forces have been accused of massacring civilians while failing to stopp the jihadi attacks.
With many western donors leaving the country, Mali’s government has been struggling to raise the money to pay the Russian mercenaries and fund its own military.