Commodities News
Reuters Staff
by Ahmed Eljechtimi
A 55,000-tonne cargo of phosphate from disputed Western Sahara left South Africa on Tuesday after being held for a year following a legal challenge by the Polisario Front independence movement, Morocco’s state phosphates company OCP said.
OCP said it had retrieved the cargo for a symbolic sum after the auction failed, but Polisario said the legal challenge and auction were a success and the phosphate was sold.
The auctioneer could not immediately be reached for comment.
Polisario charged that the shipment on board the Marshall Island-flagged Cherry Blossom was illegally extracted.
The Cherry Blossom was held at Port Elizabeth since May 1 2017 on the orders of a South African court, after being stopped en route to New Zealand.
The OCP refused to participate a South African trial over the cargo and in February the court ordered its auction.
“The refusal of all potential buyers to bid constitutes clear and irrefutable evidence of the illegitimacy of the ownership granted to the Polisario by the court in Port Elizabeth,” OCP’s General Counsel Otmane Bennani Smires said in a statement.
“In order to free their vessel, the ship operator covered the auctioneer’s costs and were awarded the cargo,” the statement said, adding that the operator restored the cargo to OCP group for a symbolic price of $1.
Polisario’s self-declared Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) presented the case as a victory.
“(SADR) observes with satisfaction the successful recovery and the sale of a cargo of phosphate rock illegally exported from the occupied part of Western Sahara,” it said in a statement.
Kamal Fadel, an executive member of SADR’s Petroleum and Mining Authority, said the buyer at the auction may have sold the phosphate on to OCP.
The South African case was a test of a new legal tactic in Polisario’s long-running conflict with Morocco over Western Sahara, a disputed territory where the two sides fought a war until a 1991 ceasefire and where U.N. talks have failed to broker an accord.
In June 2017, a Panama court dismissed another case by the Polisario to block a phosphate cargo in the Central American country.
Morocco has offered Western Sahara autonomy within the Moroccan state. Polisario wants a referendum on self-determination with independence as an option.
Reporting by Ahmed Eljechtimi in Rabat and Wendell Roelf in Cape Town; Writing by Aidan Lewis.
