| "This has been mutually agreed following a communication from Posco to this effect," Orissa steel minister Padmanabh Behera told Business Standard. |
| Posco's Orissa representative Ryuh Ho Chang told Business Standard that the possibility of signing the |
| MoU on June 22 is very high. "No issues are pending regarding setting up of the project," he added |
| Meanwhile, a high-level committee headed by chief minister Naveen Patnaik and constituted with a couple of ministers and senior officials including the chief secretary as members to oversee the smooth implementation of the project is meeting here tomorrow to finalise the terms of the MoU. |
| Behera said the date of signing of MoU will be endorsed at tomorrow's meeting. |
| The MoU will be vetted sentence by sentence to avoid any ambiguity on the project in future, pointed out an official of the state government. |
| The mines minister said, most of the disputes with Posco regarding mining lease and export of ore, which raised question marks on the future of the project has been resolved. |
| He said, the company will be allotted mines for captive consumption on a progressive basis. The company has proposed to set up a three million tonne plant in the first phase within five years and then scale it up to 12 million tonne with incremental addition of three million tonne every two years. |
| The total iron ore requirement of the project is 600 million tonne. "We will allot them captive mines to meet the needs of first two phases initially and then give them the raw material linkage for the next two phases", Behera said. |
| This meant Posco will be allotted 300 million tonne of ore in the first phase and then it may be given 600 million tonne ore as and when it expanded the capacity to 12 million tonne later. |
| The president of Posco, Chang Oh Kang, who visited Orissa in the last week of May to hold final round of negotiation with the chief minister Naveen Patnaik on the project had indicated before the leaving Bhubaneswar that the company will decide on the date of signing of the MoU in the first week of June after he went back to Korea. |
| Finalization of the MoU signing date brings to an end months of speculation about the future of the project. Earlier due to disagreements between the two parties on certain issues relating to the project, the signing of MoU scheduled for April 14 had been put off indefinitely. |
| The differences mostly pertained to export of iron ore from the state. Posco had initially demanded allocation of one billion tonne of iron ore to it, out of which it intended to export 400 million tonne of ore while utilizing the rest 600 million tonne for captive use. |
| However, the state government had rejected the proposal following which the company had brought down its demand for ore to 600 million tonne. |
| During his discussion with the chief minister in May last week, Kang had agreed that there will be "no net export of iron ore" from Orissa by the company. |
| However, the company intended "to export some iron ore with high alumina content and import equal quantity of ore from Brazil to improve the efficiency of the proposed plant". |
| Though the state government per se was not against "export of a small portion of ore allotted for captive use against import of equivalent quantity of better quality ore", differences had cropped up over the extent of such permissible quantity. |
| While Posco demanded export permission for 30 per cent of the allotted ore reserve, the state government was willing to allow it exports up to 15 per cent of the reserve against imports. |
| "An amicable solution has been reached on this front which will be known soon", Behera said. He further asserted that whatever the agreed export quantity may be, the company has to first import the high grade ore from Brazil after which only it will be allowed to export equal quantity ore and not vice versa. |
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