DATELINE: Yerevan,November 07.ArmInfo, Emmanuel Mkrtchyan. More than half of the respondents surveyed believe that Armenia needs to develop the mining sector of the economy when fulfilling certain conditions of its operation. These are the findings of a survey conducted by the Gallup public opinion research institute in cooperation with the Marketing Association of Armenia on the example of the Amulsari mining project. According to the study, one of the topics of which was the attitude of the Armenian public to the implementation of the project for the operation of the Amulsarsky zalotonosnogo field and the suspension of mine construction due to protest actions of environmental activists, 28% of respondents said that the field cannot be exploited, 26.5% thought that the project should be implemented and bring benefits to local communities, 18.9% considered that the mine should be exploited, but with active monitoring by the public and 5
2% – that the Amulsar deposit should kspluatirovatsya from Armenian, not foreign companies. Thus, from the point of view of environmental risks, which, according to the project management, were completely neutralized through technology and the implementation of a number of preventive expensive environmental programs, more than 45% of respondents considered the operation of the Amulsar project to be quite acceptable provided some of these or other conditions were observed (technology, control and .d.)
Commenting at the request of ArmInfo, the results of the poll, project manager Hayk Aloyan noted that they consider them to be fully justified and correspond to the real picture of the public perception of the Amulsar project, in which risk management was originally built into an unquestionable imperative. "Over the years of project preparation, we have been confronted with a purposeful, specifically funded campaign against the implementation of our project. In Armenia, there is no other business project, so much money would have been invested in the misinformation and denigration of which, despite the years of information war against us and the mountains of black PR, the result of the survey shows that the population of the country, of course, under certain conditions , for example hard social and state monitoring, not against its implementation. Many understand that the suspension of the construction of the mine is the result of unprovoked actions of certain forces that deliberately disorient the public and manipulate public opinion, "said Hayk Aloyan. He noted that the public is well aware that the mining industry is an integral part of the industrial complex of Armenia and it should function on the availability of modern, neutralizing possible damage, technologies and continuous public monitoring, that is, the whole set of measures that, in principle, lay at the very core of the Amulsar project.
Recall that the Amulsar project is being implemented by Lydian Armenia, which is a subsidiary of the British Lydian International, whose shareholders are major international institutional investors from the United States, Great Britain, and a number of European countries, including EBRD. The Amulsar project is the largest industrial project in Armenia today for the development of the Amulsar gold deposit with a total value of $ 370 million. In August 2016, the project for the construction and development of the deposit was launched. Preparatory work has been going on since 2006. The life of the Amulsarsky deposit will be 10 years and 4 months, with an average of 200 thousand ounces of gold (about 10 million tons of ore) planned annually. The company is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Amulsar deposit is the second largest reserves in Armenia.