(Bloomberg) — Shares of treasured metals producer SSR Mining Inc. plunged as a lot as 61% Tuesday after the US firm halted operations at its flagship Turkish gold mine following a landslide — its second incident on the web site inside two years.
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SSR mentioned it suspended operations at Çöpler Mine in japanese Turkey after a “massive slip” on the mine’s heap leach pad — a pond the place metals are extracted from ore — Tuesday morning. Rescue groups had been despatched to the world and 9 staff had been unaccounted for, based on a press release from Turkey’s Vitality & Pure Assets Ministry.
SSR’s US shares had been briefly halted after the disclosure triggered a plunge within the inventory. The shares had been down 60% to $3.87 as of 1:19 p.m. in New York, its lowest intraday since January 2016. Greater than half of SSR’s market worth has been worn out, leaving the Denver-based firm with a market capitalization of about $785 million.
Turkish politicians are criticizing SSR after the mishap, citing the corporate’s previous points on the web site close to the Euphrates River, about 650 miles (1,046 kilometers) east of Istanbul. The most recent incident comes almost 20 months after a spill of cyanide waste on the similar web site pressured the corporate to droop operations in June 2022.
“We had warned the federal government on the risks of cyanide gold mining beneath the nostril of the Euphrates River, however our warnings weren’t heeded,” mentioned Meral Aksener, chief of Turkish opposition IYI Celebration, in a publish on X.
Turkish authorities have initiated judicial and administrative investigations and the primary opposition, Republican Folks’s Celebration, despatched a delegation to the world to look at the scenario.
Çöpler is SSR’s second-largest producing gold mine, with output of 56,768 ounces in final yr’s third quarter. The power has been working since 2010 and is at the moment producing ore by way of two crops.
SSR reduce brief its Tuesday convention name with analysts to debate 2024 steerage, with Government Chairman Rodney Antal citing the incident.
“It’s entrance and heart on our thoughts proper now, and nonetheless very early, so we don’t have much more element to supply,” Antal mentioned earlier than asking the operator to finish the decision.
(Updates shares. A earlier model corrected mine manufacturing in seventh paragraph.)
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