Clive Palmer faces Citic royalties claim
Clive Palmer’s estranged Chinese business partners have called for a court to order the former MP to return $US275 million.
Clive Palmer’s estranged Chinese business partners have called for a court to order the former MP to return $US275 million ($372.6m) in royalties as part of the latest legal dispute between the pair.
China’s Citic, which operates the Sino Iron mine in Western Australia’s Pilbara, also called for the West Australian Court of Appeal to overturn last year’s landmark Supreme Court decision in the long-running royalties dispute between it and Mr Palmer, arguing for Mr Palmer to be given a share of the Sino Iron mine’s profits instead.
Citic, which was represented by Alan Archibald QC, argued yesterday that Supreme Court judge Kenneth Martin erred in ruling Mr Palmer was entitled to hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from the Sino Iron mine.
Under the original agreement, in which Mr Palmer and his private company Mineralogy sold rights to the Sino Iron mine to Citic in 2006, Mr Palmer was eligible for a royalty linked to the annual negotiated benchmark iron ore prices of the time.
That annual benchmark system was subsequently abolished, and Citic and Mineralogy have been fighting over how to resolve the royalty dispute ever since.
Justice Martin last year ruled that a royalty could be calculated using a formula linked to one of the international iron ore spot market indexes, delivering Mr Palmer a windfall in the process.
But Mr Archibald said Justice Martin had erred by using a pricing mechanism that did not feature many of the characteristics of the previous negotiated benchmark price.
Instead, Mr Archibald said, the original contract called for the introduction of a “fair and reasonable” alternative.