COPPER STOPPER

How a Toronto company's $10-billion mine closed, and became a cautionary tale for the global energy transition

- JACOB LORINC

An indigenous woman participates in a march last October against a mining contract between the Panamanian government and Canada's First Quantum Minerals.

When the group of mining executives arrived at Panama’s regal Palacio de las Garzas, they were ushered past the ornate, wood-panelled ceremonial rooms and straight to the private office of the president.

This was December 2016, before the upswell of antimining protests that would throw the country into chaos, and the team from First Quantum Minerals were greeted as old friends. After all, they were building the country’s most important project since the Panama Canal had been opened a century earlier.

But as they compared notes on the progress of their Cobre Panama copper mine, the president issued a warning.

First Quantum had lucked into an unusually sweet deal in Panama, he said. Sooner or later, the Toronto-based company would have to agree on new terms with the government and pay more taxes. What was left unsaid: it would be better to do it sooner, under a business-friendly government like his, than to gamble on Panamanian politics.

The stakes were high. The mine was set to be the centrepiece of Panama’s economy, generating between four per cent and five per cent of its gross domestic product and employing one in every 50 workers in the country. For First Quantum, which had borrowed heavily to construct a mine in the dense Panamanian jungle, it simply had to succeed.

Philip Pascall was unmoved. A swashbuckling Zimbabwean who had built First Quantum from scratch by making bold bets that few others had the stomach for, he brushed aside the president’s warning and quickly moved the conversation away from tax.