Hopes of a quick resolution to the occupational lung disease (OLD) class-action, which includes thousands of former miners afflicted with silicosis, have been tempered, with expectations of a settlement to take to the courts expected in the next six months instead of early this year as three new companies join the matter.
Speaking on the sidelines of the African Mining Indaba, Graham Briggs, the former CEO of Harmony and now chair of the working group on OLD, said the lawyers and parties involved in the class-action were hammering out a complex settlement, with a lot of details needing to be resolved before the matter could be returned to court for ratification.
There were hopes last year that an agreement for which six mining companies have made provisions totaling R5bn could be in place by the end of December, which was then rolled over to the end of March this year.
"Realistically speaking, I’d say it’s going to be six months before we have something finalised that we can take back to court," Briggs said. "We are close, but the devil is in the details and there are a huge number of moving parts."
The six mining companies are Harmony Gold, Gold Fields, African Rainbow Minerals, Sibanye-Stillwater, AngloGold Ashanti and Anglo American. Just recently, Pan African Resources, DRDGold, and Randgold & Exploration have joined the matter.
In the 12 months to end-October 2017, there were 7,756 compensation payments made to former miners with OLDs, worth R226m, compared to 1,628 compensation payments worth R79m in the same period in 2015.
The funds were paid from R3.5bn in unclaimed funds held in the Department of Health’s Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases (MBOD) as six doctors and senior managers from gold mines were seconded to the fund, stepping up the tracking and tracing of former miners in SA and neighbouring countries, leading to the increase in claimants.
The mining companies will pay a lump sum into a trust that will embark on work to locate, verify and assess former miners with silicosis, which is caused by breathing in silica dust generated during gold mining, and occupational tuberculosis. Once confirmed, the trust will make a payment to the former miner, or their family if the miner, who had a confirmed OLD, had died, Briggs said.
Mining companies would not pay the full R5bn into the trust, but rather a portion of it to fund the trust’s work; then they would make payments as claimants came into the system over the next 12 years or so and the trust made cash calls on companies, Briggs said.
The number of former miners who could approach the trust is unknown, he said, suggesting the number may be lower than the 100,000 some market commentators have said. "With our outreach programme and analysis done by actuarial people, we have been surprised how few people there are relative to the numbers that have been put out there, but we don’t know exactly."
Briggs said the once-off payments would be made in addition to funds sick workers received from the MBOD.
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