MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday expressed confidence in her incoming government’s ability to come out on top in a legal battle against Chinese miner Ganfeng and pledged to continue the current’s government stance on the matter.
In June, Ganfeng and two of its units registered an arbitration case against the Mexican government over a mining concession in Mexico’s northern Sonora state with the World Bank’s dispute settlement center.
“We’re going to uphold this legal fight so that so that lithium belongs to Mexicans,” Sheinbaum said in a press conference.
Sheinbaum, a close ally of Mexico’s resource-nationalist current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said that the government had “sufficient arguments” to win the case since the Chinese miner has not been working in the area, which the concession contract allegedly requires, according to the president-elect.
Shanghai-based Ganfeng is one of the world’s top battery makers and lithium miners.
Lopez Obrador, who has promoted a process of nationalization of Mexico’s nascent lithium industry, said in June his government would seek an agreement with Ganfeng while still defending Mexico’s rights.
In November, the Chinese group confirmed that the Mexican ministry of economy had canceled certain mining concessions of its subsidiaries in Sonora.
(Reporting by Raul Cortes Fernandez; Writing by Brendan O’Boyle and Stéphanie Hamel; Editing by Anthony Esposito)
