All too often, governments leave “money on the table” in the contracts that they sign, because of a lack of enough expertise in negotiating large-scale investment contracts. Issues such as manufacturing, the importance of infrastructure and financial modeling aspects are increasingly important and were highlighted during the panel. The G7 CONNEX initiative empowers governments to negotiate better investment contracts. CONNEX provides requesting governments with multidisciplinary, short-term and tailored negotiation support from its network of experts. Given the scope and scale of the mining industry, these experts have led to domestic resource mobilization worth billions of euros.

This panel shared the viewpoints of current and former governments officials from Mauritania and Argentina respectively. We equally had a view from the European Union regarding its support for CONNEX and its potential value as well as some of the day-to-day aspects regarding negotiation support from one of CONNEX’s experts.