According to La Tercera, the Finance and Mining ministries sent an official letter to Codelco requesting an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting. The aim is to receive information about a new case of "false production" at the Ministro Hales and Salvador divisions, where the same ore was allegedly counted twice.
The phrase "false production" comes from the state-owned copper company’s chairman, Bernardo Fontaine. Codelco’s board has an extraordinary session this Wednesday afternoon. There, according to the same outlet, directors are expected to receive more details about the case and will probably set the date for the shareholders’ meeting. The tentative date is the first week of November.
Why is the government requesting a shareholders’ meeting at a company that is 100% state-owned? Because Article 11 A of the Codelco law grants the President of the Republic the powers that Law 18,046 (the corporations law) gives shareholders. The president can delegate those powers jointly to the ministers of Finance and Mining. Put simply, the state is the sole owner, and a shareholders’ meeting is the formal forum for holding management accountable.
That delegation already took place at the annual meeting in April. Ministers Jorge Quiroz and Daniel Mas attended on that occasion and had a heated exchange with Codelco’s then-chairman, Máximo Pacheco.
The case resembles the one that came to light in May, involving Ministro Hales and Chuquicamata. At that time, Codelco acknowledged having recorded 27 thousand tonnes of copper that had not been produced. To put that figure in perspective, it is equivalent to roughly 2% of what the company reported for 2025.
After that deduction, production for 2025 stood at 1,307,570 tonnes. If the new investigation identifies more double counting, the copper company will have to adjust its copper production total for last year again. For now, there are no official estimates for the new case.
To review the figures, Codelco hired auditing firm KPMG, which will examine production at all divisions in 2024 and 2025. It also commissioned consultancy EY to investigate the new evidence of double counting.
"We are making a gigantic effort to get the accounts in order; it cannot be the case that Codelco’s accounts are not in order," Daniel Mas, Minister of Economy and Mining, said over the weekend.
Fontaine put forward a hypothesis about the origin of the problem last Wednesday before the Chamber of Deputies’ investigative committee. He attributed it to "the company’s obsession with showing high or higher production figures" and with being the world’s leading copper producer. He added that this goal cannot override "any rule, any law".
At this Wednesday’s session, directors are expected to learn how many tonnes are being counted in the new case and what the estimated financial loss would be. Those details would be presented at the shareholders’ meeting that the board could convene for November.
