cape lambert versus bsiop

From today's AFT.......

Street Talk AFR ? 13th July 2011 ? page 21
Talk of another China outfit retrenching.
Following on from Sinosteel Midwest Corporation laying off 43 employees last month comes the rumour that another Chinese company developing a major iron ore project in Western Australia has made significant job cuts. China Metallurgical Corporation (MCC) is thought to have retrenched a third of the workforce on its $3b Cape Lambert magnetite project, near Karratha, on Monday and could soon do away with more. If true, it doesn?t bode well for the future of the project which MCC picked up from Tony Sage?s Cape Lambert Resources for $400m just before the global financial crisis struck in 2008. (Six months later, Sage said he would have been lucky to have received $50m for it). Could it be that the Chinese company as lead contractor on Citic Pacific?s giant Sino Iron project in the Pilbara, has experienced just how hard it is to build a large scale magnetite mine and processing facility in WA and is backing away from its own venture? Officially, costs on Sino Iron have blown out from $US3.85 billion to $US5.2billion, but that is a dated estimate that looks forgiving based on anecdotal evidence of recent cost escalation in the WA mining sector. A string of delays to the project timetable have also pushed first production back by more than a year. Citic Pacific now expects to start commissioning the first stage of the project at the end of this month. Separate MCC subsidiaries are running the development of Cape Lambert and the construction of Sino Iron, and there appears to be little interaction between the two. It is unlikely that job cuts in the mining side of the business would have any effect on the construction side of the business. MCC was planning to start building the project next year. It was to comprise a mine with an initial capacity of 15 million tonnes of iron ore a year, a 300MW power station and a 10 km concentrate pipeline to a new port at Anketell Point.