Clive Palmer drops Pilbara port threats

CLIVE Palmer’s estranged Chinese business partners can continue to operate the Pilbara port site.

CLIVE Palmer’s Mineralogy has abandoned plans to push its ­estranged Chinese business partners off the Pilbara port site at the centre of their court battle.

Citic can continue operating the West Australian port following a Federal Court backdown from Mineralogy; it has given an undertaking to drop more than 100 termination notices aimed at having it kicked off Cape Preston, which Citic built.

The court heard earlier this week that Mineralogy had inundated Citic over months with the termination notices.

The lawyer representing Citic, Andrew Bell SC, has characterised the actions as harassment and argued the notices potentially jeopardised a $10 billion investment as well as between 1500 and 2500 jobs in the Pilbara.

Citic had pushed for the court to issue an injunction over some of the termination notices, with the group seeking a similar ­injunction to that granted by the WA Supreme Court over many of the notices in recent months.

But yesterday it emerged that since Monday Mineralogy had provided the court with an undertaking not to act on the notices to terminate until after the main issue of who is allowed to control the port is settled.

A trial over possession of the Cape Preston port has now been put back from March to June.

Citic was seeking certainty over its port operations leading up to the trial.

Yesterday in a published decision, Federal Court judge Michael Barker acknowledged Mineralogy’s undertaking to no longer pursue Citic through termination notices and postponed the main trial.

Justice Barker freed Citic to carry on as it did before it was ­inundated with the termination ­notices from Mineralogy.

“I am satisfied that the undertaking proffered by Mineralogy … is appropriate and will place in abeyance, until conclusion of the trial and the determination of the issues in this proceeding, the termination questions raised,” he said.

Earlier this year, the flagship resources company of Mr Palmer, who is federal MP for Fairfax, was accused of submitting a secret ­security plan with false claims that misled the federal government about the port that could be vulnerable to terrorism.

Among the allegations against Mineralogy is that it falsely claimed to be operating the port at Cape Preston — a key hub for ­exporting billions of dollars in iron ore — when it was actually run by its Chinese partners. In documents filed by senior public servants, the federal ­Department of Infrastructure found such “fundamental factual inaccuracies and omissions” in Mineralogy’s plans for the port that security would have been compromised at the facility.

Mineralogy’s decision to back away from its efforts to have Citic removed from the port come two months after The Weekend Australian revealed that Mr Palmer signed and executed a document in connection to the same port that he falsely backdated by 11 months to provide an explanation for his siphoning of $12 million in Chinese funds for his own use.

The document, titled “Port Management Services Agreement’’, has been previously ­described as a “sham transaction” and a fabrication by the Chinese government-owned companies which accuse the Palmer United Party leader of dishonesty and fraud.

Mr Palmer now admits the key document, which came from his company, was not created on June 1 last year, the date next to his signature on the paperwork.

Mr Palmer admits in his formal legal defence, filed in the ­Supreme Court in Brisbane, that the document was created 11 months later, in April or May this year. This means the document was produced long after he took the funds, which bankrolled his PUP during the federal election campaign last year.