Far from abandoning the battle to ensure that the alliance between SQM and Codelco is voted on by the shareholders of the private mining company, The Chinese group Tianqi is exhausting administrative tools before going the way of the courts.
The Tianqi group, a shareholder of SQM, with 22% of the property, had requested the Financial Market Commission to force the Chilean mining company to submit to the alliance that will unite the two companies in lithium from the Atacama salt flat until 2060. to the approval of an extraordinary meeting of shareholders. However, The CMF rejected the request of Inversiones TLC, Tianqi’s investment vehicle in Chile, in a ruling released on June 18. In its decision, the body determined that “it is not appropriate for an extraordinary meeting of SQM shareholders to rule on the so-called association agreement, so that said operation must be analyzed and resolved by the SQM board of directors.”
The Chinese company had until this week to appeal to the body itself, the last step before the administrative authority before beginning the path to court, something that Tianqi herself has hinted at.
“Inversiones TLC yesterday filed an appeal for reconsideration in relation to the CMF’s ruling contained in official letter No. 74987 of June 18, 2024. The CMF has a period of 15 administrative business days to rule on the matter. “As it is a process in progress, the aforementioned resource is subject to legal reservation,” the CMF responded this Thursday to Pulso’s query.
Lawyers following the case consider that the appeal for reconsideration is a preliminary procedure to proceed to the courts, since it is difficult for the CMF to modify its decision: on two occasions it has maintained the same criterion. The first was in February, after an SQM consultation carried out in January. And the second, in June. For this reason, Tianqi intends to exhaust the administrative route before going to court.
After last week’s ruling by the CMF, the company anticipated that it would not give up. The company, announced in a statement on Friday, “is evaluating all possible legal actions that may apply and will take all relevant measures in accordance with the law to assert its rights and interests as a shareholder of SQM and an international investor.”
The president of the CMF herself, Solange Bernstein, had indicated a few weeks ago that if the CMF’s ruling was not satisfactory, Tianqi had the option of filing a claim of illegality before the Court of Appeals. “In principle, the mere filing of the appeal does not suspend the effects of the CMF’s decision, unless the same court requests what is known as an order not to innovate,” Berstein said in the Mining and Energy Commission of the Senate on June 5.
Tianqi is represented in her judicial offensive by the lawyer Octavio Bofill, who also attended on behalf of the Chinese firm the first shareholder meeting forced by Tianqi, in March, to discuss the alliance. He then requested another meeting of partners, in April, to which another lawyer attended for Tianqi: Rodrigo Castillo, former executive director of the Electrical Companies association. In both meetings, SQM refused to put the alliance to a vote, since it believes, like the CMF, that the approval of the business is the exclusive power of the board of directors, where Tianqi elects three of the eight directors.
