Australian Coal Speculator Northback Resources Sues Canadian Taxpayers for $2 Billion

Is this what Gina Rinehart's Grassy Mountain ploy was all about all along? Crowsnest Headwaters warned of Aussie Miners' scam a year ago.

Gina Rinehart (right) with her legal adviser. (AI image by Midjourney)

Once again, The Tyee’s brilliant reporter Andrew Nikiforuk has exposed the black strategy behind the Australian scheme to extract millions, now billions of dollars from Canadian taxpayers.

Employing the scheme already established as a standard practice of Australia’s mining barons, Northback owner Gina Rinehart is pursuing a massive, totally unjustified settlement from the Canadian government under the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership foolishly signed by the government of Justin Trudeau.

Let’s hope his successor Mark Carney has the brains, and the balls, to fight this fraud, and renounce the CPTPP until it drops the outrageous “investor-state dispute resolution” arbitration mechanism.

Australian coal scammers have already extracted millions of dollars in settlements from the Alberta Government for reasons never explained to taxpayers. Failing revelation of the facts, the most logical explanation is that the UCP government made secret promises to the buccaneers from Down Under, promises it could not deliver in the face of widespread public revulsion at the notion of blasting apart the Rocky Mountains for metallurgical coal.

The Australian incursion may never have been about shipping shit-grade coal to Asia. It was perhaps always about Australian miners’ well-documented strategy of setting up foreign governments for massive settlements, with no intention of actually mining anything but foreign courts and taxpayers.

Crowsnest Headwaters predicted this sucker-play a year ago in the Substack post: Australia’s master miner of taxpayer dollars.

Here’s what Andrew Nikiforuk is reporting today:

Northback Holdings, a coal mining company owned by billionaire Australian Gina Rinehart, has launched a $2-billion claim against the Canadian government under a little-known trade agreement.

Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, a pact signed by Canada in 2018 to reduce tariffs and promote economic ties with 11 Asian countries, contains a provision that allows corporations to sue governments if they feel they have been mistreated, known as investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS.

Read the full story in The Tyee . . .

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