Russian Bid Chosen for Kryvy Rig Oxidized Iron Ore.

The State Property Fund announced that a final decision had been made to award Kryvy Rig Oxidized Iron Ore (KGOKOR) to a consortium of Russia’s Metalloinvest, controlled by Russian steel magnate Alisher Usmanov, and Smart Group, headed by Ukraine-based Russian businessman Vadim Novinsky. Mittal Steel also submitted a proposal, and Ukraine’s Finance & Credit business group expressed interest. A deputy SPF chairman said the decision to choose the Russian bid was made by the industry ministry, and there was no obligation to hold a tender, as the previous government had discussed. He said the SPF was in the process of negotiating a joint venture in which the state would own a stake of 50% plus one stake but the consortium would manage the company. KGOKOR is an unfinished project from the Soviet era designed to extract the iron content from other iron ore producers’ depleted refuse and from a deposit on its site with estimated reserves of 800m tonnes of low-iron-content ore. However, the Russian consortium plans to initially use it to make pellets from ore produced at other plants, with reprocessing of refuse to come later and development of reserves even further on.