Kazakhstan said on Friday, December 8, that it had bought the local subsidiary of steel giant ArcelorMittal after a series of fatal accidents in the country's mines.
In October, 46 people died in a blaze at the Kostenko coal mine in the Karaganda region – the worst accident in the Central Asian country's post-Soviet history, which prompted the nationalisation of the company's local affiliate.
On Friday the government said it had bought the ArcelorMittal subsidiary in a deal "worth $286 million." "The Kazakh government and ArcelorMittal have reached an agreement to transfer the ArcelorMittal Temirtau company to Kazakhstan," it added.
The Kazakh industry minister Kanat Sharlapayev said the agreement was "a mega-deal of exceptional importance for Kazakhstan," the largest economy in Central Asia.
While the steel giant's arrival in Kazakhstan was initially welcomed by locals after the Soviet collapse of the 1990s, its reputation has been tarnished by a string of deadly incidents in recent years. The previous deadliest mine accident in post-Soviet Kazakhstan occurred in 2006, killing 41 miners at another ArcelorMittal site. It came just two months after another incident killed five miners.
ArcelorMittal – which is run by the Luxembourg-based Indian businessman Lakshmi Mittal – had insisted that it had done everything possible to improve safety at its sites in recent years. Yet unions have criticised what they saw as failures to act on safety concerns.