In all these cases, the truth really does hurt
THERE is no evidence that the claims Clive Palmer made on Q&A against estranged business partner Citic Pacific are correct.
CLIVE Palmer boasts that he has notched up victories over “these Chinese mongrels” — his estranged business partner Citic Pacific — in separate legal battles he is waging in the West Australian Supreme Court, the Federal Court and in a private arbitration.
He also alleges that the Chinese government-owned Citic Pacific has somehow been able to dig up and ship $200 million worth of West Australian iron ore from the Pilbara without paying a cent to the state government for the privilege.
And the Queensland magnate turned MP reckons he is owed about $500m in unpaid royalties from the Sino Iron project, which Citic has built on Mr Palmer’s mining tenements.
Yet there is simply no evidence to suggest that any of these claims, all made in an indignant outburst on ABC’s Q&A, are correct.
West Australian Premier Colin Barnett was the first to shoot down Mr Palmer’s claim that Citic was exporting magnetite concentrate — a processed form of iron ore — from Sino Iron without paying a royalty.
“Citic Pacific have paid all of their royalties on time — they have been impeccable in that,” Mr Barnett said yesterday. While Citic would not divulge figures yesterday, it is understood that the company has managed to export only about $100m worth of concentrate from the project since December last year — about half of what Mr Palmer claims.
The royalties payable to the government on this relatively low level of production are tiny by West Australian standards, but, as Mr Barnett confirmed, they were being paid in full and were forecast to grow rapidly as the project expands.
On his massive legal war against Citic, Mr Palmer said on Monday night: “We’ve had three judgments — in the Federal Court, in the Supreme Court of Western Australia and an arbitration — against these Chinese mongrels. I’m saying that because they’re communist, they shoot their own people, they haven’t got a justice system and they want to take over this country. And we’re not going to let them do it.”
Anyone who has followed the labyrinthine court battles that are raging over Sino Iron would realise that Mr Palmer has had more humiliating setbacks than clear victories in his fight to seize control of the troubled project.
Just two weeks ago, his private vehicle, Mineralogy, was hit with a legal bill of more than $1m after West Australian Supreme Court judge James Edelman described its courtroom tactics over the royalties dispute between the parties as “absurd” and “unreasonable”.
Justice Edelman ordered Mineralogy to pay Citic’s legal costs after it launched a claim that radically altered the nature of its case, only to abandon the argument just four months later.
Mr Palmer claimed on television that Citic already owed him $500m in project royalties, yet the whole point of the Supreme Court case was to determine the size of the royalty owed to Mineralogy.
By slowing the case down with his bizarre tactics, he has simply delayed his eventual payday.
Mr Palmer’s tactics were also being questioned in the Federal Court back in February when Mineralogy took the brazen step of attempting to wind up Sino Iron, claiming it was insolvent despite its backing from the cashed-up Chinese government. Within days, Mineralogy had walked away from this gambit and agreed to pay all of Citic’s legal costs.
Citic, meanwhile, was emboldened to push ahead with its case against Mr Palmer over an allegation that he siphoned off $12m from a special project fund.
Mr Palmer’s only legal victories have come via a Supreme Court ruling that he is entitled to claim a very small royalty from the project, worth perhaps just hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was also boosted by a Federal Court judgment that delivered him more power over the project’s port at Cape Preston, but this is now under appeal from Citic.