Santana Minerals asked to hand over missing documents
Sunday, 12 July 2026
After months of withholding a crucial document, Santana Minerals has been directed to hand it over to the panel deciding whether its Central Otago gold mine goes ahead. Mike White reports.
Santana Minerals has been asked to produce a swathe of information regarding its plans to build a large open-cast gold mine in Central Otago.
This includes a report on how the proposed mine would affect the surrounding community, which Santana has previously refused to release publicly or to the panel considering its mine application.
Santana’s plan to build a mine near Cromwell is currently being considered by an expert panel under the Government’s Fast-track process.
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The Australian company says its Bendigo-Ophir Gold Project is New Zealand’s most significant discovery of gold in 40 years, and promises billions in revenue and hundreds of jobs over its initial 14-year life.
However, Santana has currently paused its application so it can gather further information required by the Fast-track panel.
A group opposing the mine says this points to Santana’s totally inadequate application, problems with the time-constrained decision-making process, and the risks the controversial project poses to the environment and community.
A decision on whether the mine is approved or not was due to be made by October 29.
However, with Santana suspending its application for 35 working days, until August 17, the Fast-track panel’s final decision has been pushed out until December 17.
Santana’s original application to dig four open pits in the Dunstan Range at Bendigo, between Tarras and Cromwell, was submitted in November 2025, and extended to 9500 pages of techincal reports and information, costing $8 million to prepare.
However, the Fast-track panel has subsequently made 11 requests for further information.
Its most recent, on June 25, detailed numerous reports or information that it required from Santana, including effects on surface and groundwater, environmental protection, and the company’s economic predictions.
Included among these is a social impact assessment report, dealing with how the mine might affect those living nearby.
Santana commissioned the report, which was carried out by international firm GHD, with numerous residents being interviewed. However, the report wasn’t included in its Fast-track application, or released anywhere else.
At public hearings in April, Santana’s lawyer, Joshua Leckie, told the Fast-track panel this was because there were concerns with the report’s “methodology”, but didn’t detail what these were.
Leckie accepted he hadn’t read the report, but said the panel had heard directly from several residents at the hearings, and the lack of the report was “not a material gap”.
However, panel chairman Matthew Muir, KC, asked whether the panel could draw an inference from the fact Santana had commissioned a report, but not released it, intimating there was information in it that Santana didn’t like, and Leckie accepted this was the panel’s prerogative.
In its latest request for information from Santana, the Fast-track panel noted it was “unusual for a project this size not to include a social impact assessment”, and asked the company to provide either the GHD report, or the data gathered as part of that, with an evaluation of the mine’s social impacts, and to advise the panel how it would manage these impacts.
Santana was specifically asked by the Sunday Star-Times what was the problem with GHD’s assessment methodology, but the company didn’t answer this.
Despite appearing to be thrown under the bus by Santana, with the quality of its work publicly questioned, GHD declined to make any comment to the Star-Times, instead directing inquiries back to Santana.
In a statement, Santana CEO Damian Spring said: 'Over many months, Santana has done something simple: talked to people. Explainer videos. Community presentations. Radio interviews. A steady, on-the-ground presence walking residents through what this project actually involves. That work made a difference.
“The evidence now before the panel, from submitters in support and in opposition, reflects a broader and more current read on community views than existed when the project's evidence was first being prepared.”
Delays to Santana’s application have highlighted the difficulty in assessing such complex projects as Santana’s mine under the Fast-track’s compressed timeframe.
The legislation is intended to create a one-stop shop for consents, and expedite major proposals, making the process speedier than under the Resource Management Act.
When it filed its Fast-track application, Santana described it as comprehensive and robust, and suggested the panel needed only around 30 working days to make a decision on it. The panel decided it needed 140 days.
Since then, numerous expert hearings and workshops have taken place to discuss a range of issues with the proposed mine, including ecological, cultural, heritage, landscape, and water quality effects. Issues raised in these have caused the panel to continue requesting more reports and technical data from Santana to fill gaps in its information.
In suspending its application on June 25, Santana initially indicated it may need 20 working days to provide the extra required information. That has now been extended to 35 days, with Santana saying the longer pause is to provide the panel with everything it requires to make a final decision.
The panel has requested extensive data, testing, and modelling on such things as potential contamination of waterways and aquifers; the risk of toxic effects on humans and animals; the protection of endangered lizards and rare plants; how the company would fund safeguards to the environment after the mine closed; the mine’s adverse cultural effects; and Santana’s economic projections.
It also asked Santana to advise whether it “intends that the public be indemnified against the costs of long-term low-risk high-consequence outcomes e.g. catastrophic failure, beyond mine closure and bond repayment, and if so how”.
This relates to concerns as to what might happen if the mine’s 2km tailings dam, containing up to 22 million tonnes of toxic mining waste in perpetuity, ruptured in an earthquake or otherwise, and the effects on residents and waterways downstream.
Community group Sustainable Tarras, which opposes Santana’s mine, said the new Fast-track delays exposed the significant gaps in the company’s information and application, with around 40 key issues, including the social impact assessment, still requiring more information.
“It seems incredible that an applicant would propose a huge mine and then refuse to include in their application the impacts it would likely have on the surrounding communities,” a spokesperson said.
“But, sadly, this missing report is entirely aligned with Santana’s approach, which has been to ignore the mine-adjacent community, Tarras, ignore or downplay our concerns, and even go so far as to call us ‘the opposition’.”
The group said it was astounding the Fast-track panel had to ask Santana for baseline information, for such things as water quality, this late in the process, and it underscored the incomplete nature of Santana’s original application.
“It seems highly risky for a major project or proposal that you can evaluate the impacts in the absence of baseline data available. It just makes no sense.”