TV ambush hits Anvil

Shares in Anvil Mining (AVM-T) took a hit on stock exchanges after an Australian television documentary accused the company of complicity in murders by the Congolese army last October.

In a Monday broadcast of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners news program, reporter Sally Neighbour charged that Anvil had facilitated a massacre of 21 men in Kilwa, near Anvil’s Dikulushi copper mine in eastern Katanga province. The program charged that Anvil had transported Congolese soldiers by airplane from Lubumbashi and made its trucks available for the army to crack down after a small rebel group seized the Kilwa police station last October.

Anvil says it permitted the government troops to use its vehicles and consented to soldiers travelling on chartered aircraft on return trips from Lubumbashi the airplanes were making during the evacuation of Anvil staff from the Dikulushi mine. It denied that it was implicated in shootings and beatings that followed the government’s suppression of the Kilwa revolt.

Neighbour also named Katumba Mwanke, a Katangese aide to Congolese president Joseph Kabila and a one-time government nominee on the board of Anvil’s Congolese subsidiary, as Anvil’s “protector” in the Congo.

Anvil called the documentary’s accusations “deplorable and without foundation.”

Anvil shares fell 30 to $3.50 on the day after the program aired. Australian share receipts, representing one-tenth of a Toronto-traded share, fell to A35.

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