Tuesday, July 03, 2012 -
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev announced on Tuesday plans to construct a new gold refinery near Astana, the country’s capital city.
The refinery will have an annual capacity of 25 tons of gold and 50 tons of silver.
It will be inaugurated in the fourth quarter of 2013.
"Kazakhstan is a country rich in gold fields. It is crucial that the new equipment which will be installed there will let produce the 9999 highest quality gold," said the president, speaking at a national teleconference, the KyrTAG news agency reported.
The Kazakh government will order all gold producing firms in the country to send their gold-bearing ore output to the Astana gold refinery, the Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency reported Nazarbayev as saying Tuesday.
Kazakhstan has set a gold production target of 70 tons per year from 2015.
Mazhit Turmagambetov, chairman of national mining company Tau-Ken Samruk, told teleconference participants the plant will be equipped with innovative technologies from leading German companies in the field.
The initiative is part of a forced industrialization drive to create hundreds of new industrial projects and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
Under the program, the government says it created nearly 240 companies last year, which open up more than 45,000 new jobs.