A company from Turkey - interested in building a copper processing plant in our country

A company from Turkey, which in the past bought shares of the state company Moldomin, could participate in the construction of a processing plant for the copper ore extracted by the Cupru Min Abrud company, Radu Oprea said, yesterday, in Alba Iulia. the Minister of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism. He stated that there have already been several meetings on this topic. The Turks met both with Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu and with representatives of Cupru Min Abrud.

"We are studying, and not alone, together with those who bought the shares in Moldomin, a Turkish company, the idea of realizing that combine in Romania. Copper Min can't do it alone, we have to be together with someone else and be a dimensioned capacity to meet the needs of bringing added value to copper ore in Romania. As far as I know there was a delegation, because I already met together with Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu and other colleagues from the Government with the Turkish company with the idea of starting exploitation there and bringing added value. The representatives of the Turkish company went to Cupru Min to see together how we can do this project and possibly start it in Romania. It must be a project that is profitable for Romania, because otherwise the shareholders, i.e. the citizens of Romania, must receive a dividend, i.e. added value," said Minister Radu Oprea.

The Minister of Economy, Entrepreneurship and Tourism did not say which Turkish company it would be, but G4Media journalists say that the company in question is Eti Bakir AŞ (bought several years ago by Cengiz Holding), which is a colossus of Turkish industry , with a history of almost 100 years and with activities in various fields, including mining and copper processing. According to the cited source, the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce placed the company among the top 300 companies of the country (254th place).

Cupru Min SA is one of the few companies owned by the Romanian state, which makes a profit every year, thanks to the price reached by copper on the international markets. It is also the largest employer in the Apuseni Mountains area and a political stake, the directors being alternately supported by the governing parties.

The idea of making a copper processing plant is older and is taken up by every government. The company from Abrud sells copper as a raw material, the Romanian industry no longer being able to process it. Thus, in the governing program of PSD, the promise of "construction/modernization of the Zlatna metallurgical plant" appeared already 5 years ago.

The former Minister of the Economy, Mihai Fifor, during a visit to the area, promised the resumption of metallurgical activity in Zlatna, ignoring the fact that there was nothing left on the site of the processing plant from the communist period, just as the production circuits that connected mining operations and ore processing plants.

The plant disappeared almost 20 years ago, under the pickaxes of scrap metal seekers, and since then Romania has exclusively exported ore.