De Beers buys Namco undersea mining tool
ONE of the failing Namco diamond mining group's most important assets, its NamSSol 11 undersea mining crawler, has been bought by its main competitor in the marine diamond mining industry, De Beers Marine Namibia.
De Beers Marine Namibia announced the deal in terms of which it is buying the equipment - consisting of the seabed crawler and a treatment plant and related assets on board the MV Ya Toivo - for US$20 million this week.
The deal had been in the pipeline for weeks, with the High Court in Windhoek having been informed of it some four weeks ago already, when local liquidators of some Namco subsidiaries informed the court of the proposed transaction.
The equipment at the centre of the transaction was owned by Namco Mark 11, an England-based company that has also, like the rest of the Namco group, been placed in liquidation.
The group went into liquidation in December last year, experiencing a severe cash flow crisis while its debts to banks stood at some US$50 million, debts to a major shareholder, LL Mining Corporation BV, which is connected to the Israel-based Leviev group, amounted to some US$12,6 million, and debts to other lenders stood at some US$9,4 million.
According to a statement released by De Beers Marine Namibia the company has also entered into a new charter agreement with the owners of MV Ya Toivo, which Namco had chartered to be used as a base for the NamSSol 11 (also referred to as the Nam 11) equipment.
MV Ya Toivo has left Luederitz for Cape Town, where the mining system will undergo "extensive maintenance and recommissioning" before returning to Namibia to start production in Namdeb's marine diamond mining area, the company stated.
A spokesperson of De Beers Marine Namibia, Daniel Kali, yesterday added on enquiry that the company is carrying out mining for Namdeb in the latter's marine mining area, which covers some 6 000 square kilometres off Namibia's southern coast.
De Beers Marine Namibia produced some half a million carats of diamonds last year.
Because the company is still discussing how best to utilise its newly-bought equipment it would be difficult to make a definite assessment at this stage on how the addition of the NamSSol 11 equipment will affect its production, Kali said.
Namco's underwater mining equipment had been regarded as some of the most technologically advanced of its kind in the marine mining industry.
Namco's diamond production topped some 273 700 carats in 1999, by when it had emerged as Namibia's second largest ocean diamond producer, after the De Beers group.
Only two years later, though, the Namco group was hit hard when one of its underwater mining rigs was damaged, delivering a blow to its production levels from which the group appears never to have fully recovered.
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