Diavik will be half NWT capital projects
Doug Ashbury
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Apr 02/01) - Construction spending by the owners of the Diavik diamond project will account for half the capital spending planned for this year in the Northwest Territories.
Public and private capital expenditures in the NWT are predicted to be $1.16 billion in 2001, according to figures from the GNWT Bureau of Statistics.
Britain's Rio Tinto Plc and Toronto-based Aber Diamond Corp. plan to spend $550 million on construction of the Diavik diamond mine at Lac de Gras, NWT. Rio Tinto owns 60 per cent of the Diavik project.
Jonathan Leslie, chief executive of Rio Tinto's diamonds and gold operations, said that the project is "on schedule and on budget."
Leslie, a lawyer, was appointed a director of Rio Tinto Plc in 1994, and has been in charge of the company's diamonds and gold operations since 1999.
He made the comment at a reception at the Canadian Forces Northern Area Headquarters in Yellowknife last week.
Diavik construction will also factor significantly into the 2002 and 2003 capital spending as construction of the $1.3-billion mine continues.
The mine, with an estimated resource of 101.5 million carats, is expected to go operational in the first half of 2003.
The $1.16 billion figure is up dramatically from the previous year when companies and government spent $537.6 million on capital projects.
The $1.16 billion is a 115.8 per cent increase over the $537.6 million spent in the NWT on capital projects in 2000. By percentage, the NWT's increase is higher than any other province or territory.
In Nunavut, capital spending is estimated at $245.7 million for 2001, up 9.3 per cent from year 2000 ($224.8 million: 1999).
Rounding out the increases in capital spending in the North is the Yukon. Public and private capital expenditures for the Yukon are projected to rise to $304.7 million from $271.8 million, a 12.1 per cent increase.
Nationally, total capital expenditures are forecast to increase by two per cent.
