Vice President Jeremiah Koung traveled to the facilities of Bea Mountain Mining Corporation over the weekend, receiving a firsthand briefing from company executives on the scale of current operations and an ambitious underground expansion.
The visit comes at a pivotal moment for the New Liberty Gold Mine near Kinjor in Grand Cape Mount County. Company executives told the Vice President that the operation currently processes approximately 30,000 tons of rock per month to produce around 900 kilograms of gold, with each batch of crushed rock yielding roughly 220 kilograms. According to Liberia's 16th EITI report covering fiscal year 2023, Bea Mountain Mining Corporation exported approximately 12,146 kilograms of gold valued at more than $653 million.
Going Underground
According to the briefing the vice president received during the tour, Bea Mountain has completed surface open-pit extraction and is now following the gold deposit deeper into the mountain. The company has installed ventilation fans and is working with Chinese contractors to construct a shaft seven meters in diameter that will extend 1,000 meters underground. A pump station has been established at the base of the open pit to manage water drainage as underground operations advance beneath it.
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This trajectory aligns with the company's own disclosed history. Avesoro Resources, the immediate parent company registered in the British Virgin Islands and domiciled in Canada, states in its corporate history that underground mining at New Liberty commenced in 2020, that open-pit mining ceased in 2022, and that a second processing plant was commissioned in 2021. The Vice President's visit, therefore, comes as the underground phase moves into a more advanced and visible stage, one requiring sustained investment and an entirely different regulatory and safety framework than surface mining.
The 2012 Environmental Impact Statement for the New Liberty project had anticipated mine closure beginning as early as the first quarter of 2022. That projection did not hold. The mine did not close; it expanded.
A Contract Worth Examining
The Vice President's visit also comes amid a 2023 renegotiation of the mine's legal foundation that has drawn scrutiny from transparency advocates and researchers.
Bea Mountain's mineral rights in Liberia are held under a Mineral Development Agreement originally signed in 2001, covering a contract area of 1,000 square kilometers in Grand Cape Mount County. That agreement was restated and amended in 2013, at which point it included a clause granting the government a 10 percent equity stake in the operation without dilution.
In September 2023, the National Legislature ratified a First Amendment to that agreement -- resetting the mine's operating term to 25 years from the amendment's effective date, with a possible extension of up to an additional 25 years. Critically, the 2023 amendment reduced the government's equity stake from 10 percent to 5 percent. The amended Class A Mining License reflecting the new terms was issued by the Ministry of Mines and Energy on Oct. 23, 2023.
The country's share in its most productive gold mine was halved at the same time the mine's operating horizon was extended for a generation. The government's position is that the amended terms reflect the investment required to sustain underground operations. Critics argue the concession renegotiation rewarded the company with a longer runway while delivering less to the state.
Under the 2013 contract terms, the royalty rate on gold is set at 3 percent on a net smelter return basis, payable within 30 days of each month-end shipment, with a corporate income tax ceiling of 25 percent during the stabilization period. A community development fund obligation requires annual contributions of $100,000 in the early contract years, rising to $250,000 from year 11 onward.
Against gold export revenues of more than $653 million in FY2023 alone, those community fund figures are, by any measure, modest.
What the Government Receives
LEITI's FY2023 reconciliation report lists government revenues attributed to Bea Mountain at approximately $33.47 million for that fiscal year. The Associated Press, in an investigation covering the preceding 18-month period from July 2021 to December 2022, reported that the company contributed $37.8 million to government coffers during a period in which it exported more than $576 million in gold.
The ratio, roughly six cents on every dollar of gold exported, has become a recurring point of contention in Liberian civil society and media. Whether that ratio reflects legitimate deductions under the stabilization and cost-recovery provisions of the MDA, or reflects structural terms that consistently favor the operator.
A May 2025 multi-agency compliance assessment, led by the Liberia Revenue Authority and the Ministry of Mines and Energy, inspected Bea Mountain's smelting, packaging, weighing, and storage processes, and reviewed export procedures at Roberts International Airport. The LRA described the exercise as confirming standard operating procedures. Whether it produced any enforceable findings has not been publicly disclosed.
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The Environmental Record
Liberia's Environmental Protection Agency, in a clarification published in February 2026, confirmed that three pollution incidents between 2016 and 2023 were verified by laboratory testing. Those incidents involved cyanide concentrations above permissible limits and fish deaths linked to releases of cyanide, copper sulfate, and arsenic from the mine's tailings infrastructure. The EPA said it issued remedial directives and required engineering works at the tailings facility following those incidents, and stated that a legally binding agreement for the relocation and compensation of the downstream community of Jikandor was reached in May 2025.
Investigative reporting by The DayLight, a Liberian outlet, and The Gecko Project, an international investigative platform, documented findings of an unapproved wastewater system, allegations that company representatives obstructed EPA inspectors' access to laboratory records during at least one investigation cycle, and questions about whether recommended fines were consistently levied and collected.
