Subsidiary of big Russian holding plans to produce copper in the Kostanay region
Tarutinskoye, a Kazakhstani company controlled by the Mikheevskiy GOK (part of the Russian Copper Company), plans to produce up to 500,000 tons of copper and gold ore per year at the East Tarutin field in the Karabalyk district of the Kostanay region.
According to the company’s statement, the East Tarutin gold and copper field has a confirmed annual capacity of 500,000 tons of ore, depending on actual reserves. Production is expected to start at three pits — Northern-1, Northern-2 and Southern — with a total area of 24.2 hectares, by the open-cut mining method. Preparation work will start in 2026, while production itself is expected to be launched in 2028.
Initially, the company planned to conduct the work over the period from 2023 to 2032. Now, it is cutting the timeline for the project: preparation work is going to happen from 2026 to 2027, with the production phase from 2028 to 2032. Over this period, the company plans to produce 942,100 tons of ore that will be stored at Southern and Northern ore warehouses for further sorting by metal content. The water from the pits will be dumped into Salty Lake.
The East Tarutin field is located 175 kilometers northwest of the regional capital — Kostanay — and 55 kilometers from the district center — the Karabalyk settlement. The area of the East Tarutin field’s license claim is 4.76 square kilometers on the surface and 112 meters deep.
“In 2010, the Socio-Entrepreneurial Corporation Tobol signed a contract with the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies (currently called the Ministry of Industry and Construction) aimed at the exploration and production of gold and copper ore in the East Tarutin field. In 2011, they signed an annex to the contract on transferring the subsoil use rights to the Tarutinskoye company. The life span of the contract is 31 years, with six years for exploration and 25 years for production. In 2018, the deadline for exploration was extended through 2020. In that year, the Ministry of Infrastructural Development (now, the Ministry of Industry and Construction) supported amending the working program and license claim.
In April 2023, a decision was made to switch to production in 2024 and amend the working program once again. Mikheevskiy GOK became the sole owner of Tarutinskoye in December 2022. According to the company’s financial statements, as of Dec. 31, 2023, Tarutinskoye owed $8.8 million in loans to Mikheevskiy GOK, compared to $7.4 million the previous year. The parent company provided this money at a 1% interest rate.
As of Dec. 31, 2023, Tarutinskoye controlled $12.4 million in aggregated assets, compared to $9.6 million the previous year, and $2.8 million in undistributed profit (vs. $2.5 million). The company’s net profit for 2023 reached $282,398, compared to $167 in 2022. The sole owner of Tarutinskoye is Mikheevskiy GOK (located in the Sverdlov region of Russia), which in turn is part of the Russian Copper Company. Even though there is no open-source data about the final beneficiaries of the latter company, some Russian media outlets pointed to Igor Altushkin, a Russian tycoon with a fortune of $3.8 billion, as the owner of the Russian Copper Company.
