These motivations are not trivial. As a reminder: the Montagne d'Or project has become the emblem of the controversies surrounding industrial mining in French Guiana. Its defenders emphasize the improvements that professional and modern exploitation would bring compared to gold panning, often illegal, practiced in the territory. While opponents point to the environmental damage increased tenfold simply because of the scale of industrial installations, and the specific damage caused by the exploitation of gold and the use of cyanide.
If an appeal to the Council of State is still possible, the debate now seems to have been settled by French justice. The culmination of a long legal battle, since the extension of the two concessions concerned – “Elysée” and “Montagne d’Or” – initially awarded in 1946 and 1948, before coming to an end at the end of 2018, has passed in recent years from court to court. While the Compagnie Miniere Montagne d'Or company began by winning its fight against an implicit decision of non-renewal by the French government at the time, a decision by the Council of State at the end of 2023 reshuffled the cards based on a new case law from the Constitutional Council, dating from 2022. This requires the administration to take into account the environmental impacts of mining projects (and no longer just the financial and technical capacity of the project leader) before extending them.
It is this turnaround whose effects are felt in the decision of the Bordeaux court of November 26, which highlights the risks for protected species despite the numerous compensation and mitigation measures planned in the project… “It's is a victory”, reacts by email Nolwenn Rocca, lawyer and coordinator of the Guyane Nature Environnement association, for whom this decision “opens the jurisprudential path to the cancellation of mining projects on the basis of the protection of the environment”.
Departure of the big miners?
Beyond the legal aspect, the decision weakens a project that is already in very poor shape. The two entities originally present in the Montagne d'or mining company – the Russian Nordgold, majority, and the Canadian Orea Mining – have been absent for a year. The first due to the sanctions which followed the war in Ukraine, which prevent it from acting in Guyana. The second because it went bankrupt at the beginning of 2024, after the failure of an attempt (due to a blockage by Canada) to buy Nordgold's shares in the project.
A Mongolian construction and engineering company, Hexagon Build Engineering, bought Orea's shares at the commercial court this summer, but has not revealed its plans. On site, several observers note that the activity seems to have stopped and that the Montagne d'Or Mining Company no longer has representation in Guyana… In 2021, NordGold had initiated arbitration litigation against France which, according to France Nature Environnement , resumed this year.
«This is the start of Guyana's second industrial mine project», notes a good connoisseur of the sector, in reference to the departure of the world number 1 in gold, Newmont, from the Espérance project (sometimes called “Montagne d'or bis”), revealed by the media France Guyane at the start of the year . While many industrial mining projects are being carried out in the neighboring countries of Suriname and Guyana, with similar geology and less strict regulations, almost only small operations remain in French Guiana. Only Auplata Mining, a French group listed on the Paris Stock Exchange, still remains active in a semi-industrial manner, via the exploitation of the alluvial deposit and the Dieu-Merci cyanidation plant, the only one in Guyana.
The latter continues its activity, which it ensures to the best environmental standards, and produced 164 kilos of unrefined gold in the first half of 2024. But Auplata Mining is in a legal conflict to obtain the extension of its concessions – contested by Guyana Nature Environnement which fears in particular a risk for the adjacent Trinity National Reserve in the event of a dam failure – and must provide new information to the Environmental Authority by July 2025. The group also obtained, in August, a new operating permit for an area located in the town of Saint-Elie, not far from its factory.
