COMALCO MEETING No Announcement On Taking Option

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31864, 17 December 1968, Page 1

COMALCO MEETING No Announcement On Taking Option

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) SYDNEY, December 17. No statement was issued after the board of directors of Comalco Industries Proprietary, Ltd, had met at the company’s head office in Melbourne today.

A Comalco spokesman said tonight that it was not known what decisions had been made or whether any announcement would be made in the near future.

The board had been expected formally to agree to sign its option with the New Zealand Government to take power from the Manapouri hydroelectric project for its proposed aluminium smelter at Bluff. The option expires on December 31, and a joint Com-pany-Government statement formally announcing that the plan would go ahead is expected before Christmas.

The company spokesman said today’s meeting—expected to be the last before the option expires—had discussed the whole range of Comalco activities, but he confirmed that the Bluff smelter was high on the agenda. He said that all arrangements for the smelter, which is due to be commissioned in early to mid-1971, had been substantially decided. “There are only a few minor things to be put together,” he said. It is believed that most points of the agreement between Comalco and its Jap-

anese partners in the smelter —Sliowa Denko K.K. and the Sumitomo Chemical Company —have been tied up. No Japanese executives were present at today’s meeting and the Comalco spokesman said there were no plans for more Comalco-Japanese talks in the immediate future.