Africa-Press – Angola. A new diamond mine, owned by “Sociedade Mineira do Luele”, located in the municipality of Saurimo (Lunda Sul), will start operating later this year, between the months of August and November, announced yesterday, the chairman of the board director of Sociedade Mineira de Catoca, Benedito Manuel.
With an extension of around 1,195 square kilometres, the Luele mine has 149 wells, corresponding to 44 thousand meters drilled. At that moment, more than 20 million cubic meters of mining mass have already been removed to reach the “kimberlite”.
The undertaking, whose shareholders are Sociedade Mineira de Catoca, Endiama and Alrosa, will have an estimated useful life of 30 years, and expects to employ over a thousand workers by the peak of the project.
This project currently called Luele is the former mine of Luaxe.
The director general of Catoca, Benedito Manuel, said that, within the established deadlines, the mine will be inaugurated and the operations at Luele will effectively start.
“Everything depends on the evolution of the installation of the Treatment Center, since in terms of operations everything is adequate, stable and current”, assured the manager, having stressed that with the installation of Luele’s own treatment center, a high quality kimberlite.
Benedito Manuel explained that he will not manage Catoca, as his role ends now and he will only provide the necessary support to the project as partners.
He said that Luele will have its own bodies to manage the mine and within this month they will announce the date for recruiting workers.
He underlined that for the effective recruitment of personnel a company specialized in the selection of human capital was contracted, which will, within days, set up its offices in the city of Saurimo, and then start the process.
He made it known that there is a specific number of human staff to be recruited, but when the project starts in experimental consolidation/expansion phases and the peak of production until 2027, it will work in full.
That is, in the first phase a hundred citizens will be recruited, in the second more than 500, in the third phase, over a thousand people trained in various specialties.
If forecasts prove to be correct, the mine’s maximum production will exceed eight million carats/year, up from the more than nine million currently generated across the country.
For More News And Analysis About Angola Follow Africa-Press
