Aug. 26, 2007
On March 27, Alan Hill, president and CEO of Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources, was named 'Responsible Manager of the Year' in the 'international' category at an event hosted at the Austrian Parliament in Vienna. Barbara Prammer, president of the Austrian Parliament, presented the award. Hill was recognised for his leadership of Rosia Montana Gold Corp., a Romania-based project that could result in the construction of Europe's biggest gold mine. Rosia Montana, however, has proved bitterly controversial, and faces widespread domestic opposition.
According to the jury, Hill is "committed to social and ecological responsibility in a challenging business like mining, which does not typically apply such criteria."
The mining concern now employs around 400 people, most from the Rosia Montana community, which is currently suffering from roughly 30-percent unemployment. Gabriel Resources claims that the project will employ 1,200 for two years of construction, and 600 over a projected 17-year project lifespan, which together will indirectly generate a further 6,000 jobs.
The project is opposed, however, by those who argue that the company is actually behaving in an ecologically and socially irresponsible manner. Harry Eyres wrote in the Financial Times that the mine would "involve flattening four mountains and obliterating much of Romania's oldest recorded settlement and one of the most important Roman archaeological sites in Europe." The same article cited physician and epidemiologist Julian Tudor Hart, who wrote: "Open-cast mining is indeed a degradation of the environment generating minimal employment at maximal environmental cost."
Eugen David, president of Alburnus Maior, an association of property owners in Rosia Montana opposed to the mine, has claimed that 90 percent of Romanians oppose the mining scheme.
