RE: New RNS just out !4 Apr 2017 10:04
n my view, one of the most unsound things about the Award is the Tribunal's unsubstantiated condemnation of the Company for its failure to conduct reasonable due diligence over a period that spanned many years without ever articulating what it considered the standard due diligence program of an investor in the Indonesian mining sector was at the time. We also note that the State did not put on any such evidence. Indeed, the few due diligence materials that were incidentally on the record were filed by Churchill and went directly against the Tribunal's conclusions on this critical point: none of the documents showed that other mining investors into Indonesia considered the forgery of signatures on official State documents to be a known risk at the time, let alone that forensic document examination was a standard due diligence item for mining companies investing in Indonesia.
Having not identified what it considered a reasonable due diligence process to be, we are even more confused by the Tribunal's conclusion that Churchill should have done yet more due diligence after the making of the investment. Due diligence is of course an important process but it occurs prior to the making of an investment not after.