My name is Jochen Tilk. I'm a citizen of Canada. I'm the CEO and president of Inmet Mining. I've been with the company for 23 years.
We've been involved in Panama for 20 years, essentially since 1990. I've been personally involved in Panama for much of that time, but quite significantly in the last 10 years. We're pursuing a very large development project in the resources sector, in mining. To be specific, it's a copper mine, and the investment is $6.2 billion, which is about a fifth of Panama's current GDP.
The commitment we have made—and this is really in conjunction with the Panamanian government—is to adhere to the IFC performance standards. Those are standards in the extractive industry that are set out by the World Bank and the IFC. We've adhered to what we call “free, prior and informed consent” with communities, which means asking communities to provide their consent and endorse the development in the extractive industry.
We've been working with the Panamanian government in capacity-building to ensure that as a regulator and governing institution, they have the capacity. We did receive the approval of an environmental and social impact assessment as a result of that interaction.
We've also moved forward on financing of that $6.2 billion, which involves a number of parties, including some other Canadian companies. To name one, Franco-Nevada is one of the Canadian royalty companies that provides financing and intends to provide $1 billion of that $6.2 billion as financing.
We also work very closely with Canadian contractors, as this project is now in construction. Construction commenced in earnest in May of this year. SNC-Lavalin, just named by my predecessor, is one of the leading contractors in the country.
We do have a partnership with some of the financial institutions. We do have one with the EDC in the area of sustainability.
We support the proposed act for a number of reasons. Number one is the significant investment that we are making; Inmet, as a Canadian public company, certainly has a vested interest in this act's going ahead. I concur with the conclusion that many improvements have been made in our 20 years of involvement, including capacity-building in the country, adherence to standards and to the highest environmental standards. We believe that all of that is beneficial both for Panama and certainly for Canada.