Ex-MD of PMC shows he cares
2008-06-18
Keith Marshall, former managing director of Palabora Mining Company (PMC), has shown that Phalaborwa touched his heart. Only a few months into his new job at Ivanhoe Mines in Mongolia, he has sent one of his senior managers, Layton Croft, to see how the Palabora Foundation supports the community in an effort to create similar support for the Mongolians.
Layton Croft, Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Social Responsibility at Ivanhoe, says that when he first met Keith Marshall and asked him about his previous work, all he wanted to talk about was the Palabora Foundation. “I knew he had a long career in engineering at mines all over the world, but he didn’t want to talk about that. He kept coming back to the work that was being done by the Palabora Foundation!” says Croft. “He told me it was my duty to visit Phalaborwa and see what they were doing there”. With Marshall’s obvious enthusiasm for his area of work, Croft says he is highly motivated because he knows that he has full support from the top.
Rio Tinto has a ten per cent share in Ivanhoe Mines, which could shortly become one of the largest copper and gold mines in the world. Mongolia, located between Russia and China, is very different in many ways to Phalaborwa but there is a great need to support communities in the area around the new mine. Around 30 per cent of its population of 2.2 million are nomadic herders, moving their tented camps around the vast countryside. The mine has undertaken to recruit the majority of its employees from the Mongolian population. Set in a deep rural area with no roads and no infrastructure for electricity and water, the area presents a similar situation to Ivanhoe Mines as was faced by the Phalaborwa mines in the 1950s.
Despite the fact that the mine is not even operational yet, Keith Marshall is keen to ensure that the communities are involved and supported from the very beginning, and he sees the Palabora Foundation as a possible role model for the foundation being established by Ivanhoe Mines. Layton Croft has spent the last week scrutinising every aspect of the Palabora Foundation’s operations in an attempt to hit the ground running in Mongolia. As he has toured schools and other community areas, he has asked the people there what they find most and least useful, what they would like to see and, most importantly, what they would advise him in setting up a foundation for Ivanhoe Mines. He has clearly been as impressed by Phalaborwa’s social investment programmes as his boss was.
So, one day in the future when you see on the news how Mongolian nomads are benefitting from a world-beating social investment programme, you’ll know where many of the ideas came from!
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