China Group Wins Afghan Copper Rights – Jon Boone and Geoff Dyer

From The Financial Times:

A state-owned Chinese company has won the right to develop a large copper deposit in Afghanistan after agreeing to invest $3bn (€2.02bn, £1.45bn) in the project, the Afghan mines minister announced on Tuesday.

The deal is the largest foreign investment in Afghanistan’s history and will give China Metallurgical Group (MCC) the right to extract high-quality copper from the Aynak copper field near Kabul. The company will pay the Afghan government $400m a year to exploit what some geologists think could be the world’s biggest copper deposit. [Full Text]