Silo in the Port of Ploče has Finally Been Returned into Possession of Aluminij

As aresult of strong efforts, after numerous meetings and negotiations, a definitive agreement has been reached betweenthe authorities Aluminij d.d. Mostar and the Port of Ploče d.d., i.e., between the directors of these two companies, Mr. Ivo Bradvica and Mr. Ivan Pavlović, in regards the right of  Aluminij to manage its asset within the Port of Ploče.

It is a silo for alumina storing with capacity of 20,000 tons, which we haven`t been able to use (although it is our property) since the smelter production restart in 1997. We have had intense and tough negotiations over the past year, which was one of the priority objectives of the Aluminij`s Board of Directors Work Program that has now been successfully resolved, and it happened even before the New Year, which was set as a deadline.

Before the recent war, Aluminij used this silo for its alumina export, until April 1992 when the Serbian-Montenegrin aggressors completely destroyed the alumina plant in Mostar, which was no longer possible to recover. For the objective technical reasons it was difficult to modify the purpose of this silo so that instead of shipping the alumina to vessels it is used to receive raw material and charge trains heading to Mostar in the second half of the 1990`s. As such the silo was neglected for years, and then in a given moment it was given by the Port of Ploče at the disposal to alumina refinery Birač from Zvornik, for their export purposes.

Thanks to the perseverance of the Aluminij Board of Directors, as of October 31, 2011 the silo is again under the undisputed ownership of the Mostar smelter and the Port Administration has instructed Birač to completely vacate it and to give it at disposal to the management of Aluminij d.d. Mostar, as its real owner.

- I believe that our experts will find a quick solutionto bypass the technical difficulties and to refit the silo that will, from now on, store our alumina which is imported through Glencore International AG from Greece. Our gain is multiple because we have been struggling for years with the fact that due to shallow draft in this part of the Adriatic Sea, we were forced to operate only with the smaller vessels, up to 8,500 metric tons of capacity, which used to be immediately reloaded into trains heading to Mostar. Because of that wefound ourselves several times on the brink of disaster due to strikes in the Railways of the Federation BiH and were waiting for days for the necessary raw material for our Electrolysis Plant operating, and wealso used to pay tens of thousands of BiH convertible marks [KM] for demurrage fees in the Port of Ploče. From now on we will be able to unload the cargo immediately after arrival, and store the purchased alumina into our silo and make plans much easily of its transshipment to Mostar, with significantly lower costs of the port services. This is a great success for Aluminij in this time of recession, when we have been facing the highly volatile metal market and high monthly losses, and this is also a shift in the way of the final overcoming of financial crisis - said the director Bradvica.