OCIM joins LBMA as Full Member
LBMA acknowledges OCIM’s commitment to demonstrating the best practice across its business operations in the precious me-tals industry and has welcomed gold and silver supplier OCIM as a Full Member of LBMA.
As historically active through its physical trading and financial tra-ding activities, OCIM is effectively a trusted leader in Peru’s licensed ASM sector through its wholly owned subsidiary Soleil Metals, which operates two processing facilities supplied with gold ore from for-malized artisanal miners.
OCIM shares LBMA’s mission of promoting best practices in gold and silver production, and dedication to upholding excellence and transparency across the industry. OCIM recognises the importance of formalising Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASM) value chains and engages regularly with LBMA on these matters as a participant of LBMA’s ASM Taskforce, which developed the ASM Toolkit. While sharing the same core principles of sustainable and res-ponsible sourcing which underpin the independently audited rela-tionship between large scale mines and LBMA gold refiners, the ASM Toolkit addresses a range of issues specific to the sector, such as the presence of formal regulatory oversight and of pre-refinery aggregators, legal titles and mining licences.
More broadly, this Full Membership comes at a time when LBMA has taken a series of concrete steps designed to encourage the in-clusion of ASM gold into mainstream supply lines, after noting that responsible sourcing programmes had unintentio-nally marginalised the sector due in part to rigorous sourcing standards, lack of engagement and refi-ners and buyers concerns about reputational risk. This ambition has already been realized through concrete steps that advance not only the gover-nance of the sector, but also open direct market ac-cess for those who depend either wholly or in part on artisanal-produced gold for their livelihood.
“This decision strengthens our legitimacy across the precious metals ecosystem, particularly downstream in the value chain, while enabling us to actively participate in defining increasingly stringent industry standards alongside our peers”, explains Laurent Mathiot, Chairman and CEO of OCIM.
