Word: grasberg
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...months after the Aug. 31 attack, it seemed likely that no one would unravel the mystery of why these teachers were targeted on a mountain road leading to the giant Grasberg mine, which is run by P.T. Freeport Indonesia (PTFI), a subsidiary of New Orleans-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold. The military blamed the attack on the Free Papua Movement, a ragtag group of Papua rebels fighting a desultory war to free the province from Indonesian rule, but produced scant evidence to back the claim. Meanwhile, relatives of the slain teachers have grown increasingly frustrated by the inability of local...
...Until now. Reports are finally leaking out that may shed some light on the case. A preliminary police-investigation document obtained by TIME posits that members of the Indonesian military?who were supposed to protect miners, international teachers and other expats connected to the Grasberg mine?may have been behind the killings, not the separatist Free Papua Movement...
Indonesia is the site of Freeport's most important asset, the Grasberg open-pit mine, developed under the auspices of the Suharto regime. A giant crater scooped out of a mountainside in the jungles of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea, the $60 billion mother lode contains one of the world's largest single deposits of copper and gold...
Moffett's Dale Carnegie routine worked wonders when Suharto ran the show. There were afternoons of golf with the ruler and friendships with his family and business cronies. Indeed, Suharto interests own a multimillion-dollar stake in the Grasberg mine, which surely did not hurt Moffett's effort to maintain mining rights there on favorable terms. The deal was so sweet, in fact, that Freeport has long been the world's lowest-cost producer of copper, a key industrial metal...
...statement to TIME, Freeport argues that its stock is "significantly undervalued," in part because Wall Street has misread Indonesia's political mood. Freeport notes it will reduce debt $200 million in 1999, and has received permission to boost ore production at Grasberg from 220,000 tons a day to 300,000 tons in exchange for doubling its royalty payments to the government...
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