Cronimet German company that owns 60% in the company Zangezur Copper Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC) exploiting Kajaran mine, Armenia, recently responded to business-humanrights.org platform’s enquiry. The subject of the inquiry was actually raised by Armenian Environmental Front (AEF), a local civil initiative that has been alarming about some of the violations of local laws by the company as well as concerns with its environmental performance (more in here and here). In its response (which can be found here) that came after Business and Human Rights Resource Center placed the corresponding article on its website, the company states that it adheres to the policy of sustainable development and that it has no purpose to avoid obligations laid by laws in Armenia. As a reminder, AEF published an article where it showed the illegal increase of the amount of ore extracted from the Kajaran mine by the company. It mentioned that “…starting from 2010 ZCMC illegally increased its extraction volumes, while during the past five years it extracted up to 17-19 million tons annually [instead of 12.5 million tones permitted]. Thus during the past 7 years ZCMC extracted and processed 29.7 million tons more ore than permitted as a result of which same amount of additional ore wastes were dumped into Artsvanik tailing, thus increasing the volume of environmental pollution.”...