Loading ...TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – After a knife-edge campaign Dilma Rousseff, leader of the left-wing Workers’ Party, was re-elected with just 51.6% of the vote in Brazil’s October elections. Much of the debate revolved around the country’s disappointing economic performance; Brazil’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth has been lethargic over recent quarters and many analysts have predicted it will achieve an expansion of just 1% across 2015.
In part, this is due to the resource supercycle hiatus – the plunge in iron-ore price across the second half of 2014 – a grim and worrying reminder of this for the country’s mining sector.
There is another concern: the debate on overhauling Brazil’s mining code is likely to start in earnest after February 2015, the government revitalising Bill 5807 that it introduced to Congress in June 2013. Its primary goals are twofold: to increase state revenues from mining royalties and to replace the current first-come, first-served system of awarding concessions with an auction process.
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