Chinese ‘spying’ on mine reconciliation meeting, says Clive Palmer

Clive Palmer has accused his estranged business partner of planning to send a spy to a planned reconciliation meeting.

Clive Palmer last month.

Clive Palmer has accused his estranged Chinese business partner Citic of planning to send a spy to a planned reconciliation meeting between the parties.

Just a fortnight after Mr Palmer said he would “extend the hand of friendship” to Citic in an attempt to resolve the disputes which threaten the future of the $10 billion-plus Sino Iron mine in Western Australia’s Pilbara, Mr Palmer slammed the Chinese group for not offering a sufficiently senior executive to meet him.

Mr Palmer said he was only offered a meeting with the chief executive responsible for Sino Iron, Chen Zeng, rather than Citic chairman Chang Zhenming. He also said he had received advice that an unnamed Citic representative proposed to attend the meeting had a background in espionage.

“One of the people in the group was advised to me to be an intelligence officer, that’s been confirmed a couple of times,” Mr Palmer told The Australian. “And when you’re dealing with a Chinese government-owned corporation it’s not unusual.”

Mr Palmer has a history of making accusations of spying. He infamously called Wendi Deng, the then-wife of News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, a “Chinese spy” and in 2012 said the Greens were being supported by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

The former MP said Mr Zeng was “pretty junior” and did not have the authority to make any decisions in the ongoing disputes between Citic and Mr Palmer’s private company Mineralogy. Instead, he said, only Mr Chang was sufficiently senior to resolve the impasse.

“If you’re going to have a chairman-to-chairman meeting, you do it because you want to resolve everything and make decisions,” Mr Palmer said.

“We were quite happy to meet with their chairman to see if we could sort things out. He didn’t want to meet us, which was disappointing.”

Mr Palmer has continued to deny his consent to Citic’s requests for more space at the Sino Iron project to store concentrate stockpiles.

He told The Australian there was sufficient space available in existing areas for Citic to place its additional stockpiles.

Mineralogy and Citic have been at loggerheads for years over various legal disputes stemming from their original deal over Sino Iron. Citic paid Mineralogy more than $400 million for the rights to mine there and have since spent billions developing the project, but the two groups have been locked in legal battles over royalties linked to the mine.

The parties are due to resume the royalties fight in WA’s Supreme Court today.

Citic has previously warned that it could shut the mine if it does not receive the expansion consents from Mr Palmer, or if the court finds Mineralogy is entitled to a $6-a-tonne royalty.