Northern Ashanti Mines Company Limited has applied to the Commercial Division of Ghana’s High Court in Accra for an injunction restraining the Minerals Commission and the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources from taking over its Konongo gold mine concession or reallocating the mineral rights while its challenge to the lease termination is decided. The Attorney-General is also a respondent.
The dispute dates to April 30, 2026, when the Minerals Commission, acting for the minister, terminated the company’s mining lease, alleging breaches that had not been remedied within the required period. Northern Ashanti, formerly Owere Mines, says it renewed the lease on February 2, 2023 for 13 years over about 125 square kilometres, that Parliament ratified the renewal, and that the lease runs to February 1, 2036. It says it was not given notice of the alleged breaches or a chance to remedy them, and it has also filed for judicial review seeking to quash the termination letter.
In a supporting affidavit, administrative manager Jonathan Adongo says Minerals Commission officials accompanied by military personnel visited the mine on October 22 and instructed the company, its employees and workers to leave the site, offices and residential facilities by midday. The company describes the threatened takeover as imminent and says it has committed more than US$83.34 million on the concession, with a recently secured facility of over US$30 million toward a gold processing plant it says is more than half complete, taking the investment at risk to about US$110 million. It employs about 220 people redeveloping the historic Konongo mine, dormant for at least 15 years before its work began.
The motion is expected to be moved on Thursday, October 29. The court has not granted any relief yet, and the claims in the affidavit are untested.
Jurisdiction watch: Ghana features twice in today’s mining news for opposite reasons, the state asserting control at Konongo while its GoldBod formalisation fight continues in Parliament. The pattern to watch is procedural: whether terminations follow the statutory cure process is the point on which foreign and domestic investors alike will judge the case, and it sits inside a wider West African run of mining code and tenure revisions.