“Rosemont’s Power Play” Posted on August 23

“Rosemont’s Power Play”
Posted on August 23, 2012

The multimedia project includes:

Report: A Sardinian gold mine unearths the deceptive business tactics of Rosemont Copper’s top executives.
Timeline: The top officers of Rosemont Copper’s parent company, Augusta Resource Corporation, have a history of bankruptcies, cease trade orders and stock exchange delistings
“Cyanide Beach”: The 23-minute video documentary “Cyanide Beach” tells an important and timely story that anyone interested in the Rosemont copper mine project needs to know.

The multimedia project focuses on Augusta Resource Corporation, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based speculative mining company that wants to build a massive open pit copper mine in the environmentally-sensitive Santa Rita Mountains on the Coronado National Forest 35 miles south of Tucson, AZ.

InvestigativeMEDIA reviewed thousands of pages of financial documents and conducted interviews in the United States, Canada and Italy to document the business history of Augusta’s key executives.

The probe uncovered a tangled history of cease trade orders, an insider trading settlement agreement, stock exchange delistings, personal and corporate bankruptcies, false disclosure statements to regulators and an abandoned Sardinian gold mine that is creating serious, ongoing environmental problems.

Las Cienegas National Conservation Area


President Clinton signed a bill creating the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area (NCA) and Acquisition Planning District in southeastern Arizona on December 6, 2000. The designation was the result of Congress' passage of H.R. 2941 (Congressman Jim Kolbe). The new 42,000-acre NCA consists entirely of public lands managed by the BLM's Tucson Field Office. The NCA is bordered on the north and east by lands within the Acquisition Planning District.

Augusta owns the Rosemont Copper Company. Rosemont is seeking government permits to build what could become one of the largest copper mines in the United States, producing 240 million pounds of copper annually for approximately 21 years.

The mile-wide, half-mile deep mine would dump waste rock and mine tailings on more than 3,000 acres of the Coronado National Forest and destroy much of a watershed that provides runoff to a rare, shallow Sonoran Desert aquifer beneath the federally-protected Las Cienegas National Conservation Area.

Cienega Creek, with its perennial flow and lush riparian corridor, forms the lifeblood of the NCA. The area is home to a great diversity of plant and animal life, including several threatened or endangered species. Protection of this regionally significant open space safeguards a network extending south of Interstate 10 to protected lands in northern Sonora, Mexico.



The BLM Tucson Field Office manages the NCA, which includes the Empire-Cienega Resource Conservation Area. Lands within the Acquisition Planning District are owned and managed by Pima County, National Audubon Society, the State of Arizona, and numerous private landowners.

The Las Cienegas NCA includes a variety of unique and rare vegetative communities including five of the rarest habitat types in the American Southwest: cienegas (marshlands), cottonwood-willow riparian forests, sacaton grasslands, mesquite bosques, and semi-desert grasslands.

Fish and Wildlife: These vegetative communities on the NCA support a diverse assemblage of plants and animals; species include 60 mammals, 230 birds, 43 reptiles and amphibians, and three native fish. Included in this list are 33 species which are federally listed as threatened or endangered, identified as species of special concern by the State of Arizona, or designated as sensitive species by the BLM. Among the special status species are the endangered Gila top minnow, lesser long-nosed bat, and southwestern willow flycatcher; the Chiricahua leopard frog, proposed for endangered species listing; and the Gila chub, a candidate for federal listing. Large game animals include mule and white-tailed deer, pronghorn antelope, javelina, and mountain lion.




Historic Empire Ranch
Las Cienegas National Conservation Area



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