Colombian Mines Corporation (TSXV:CMJ) CEO Robert Carrington shared his perspective as an entrepreneur in Colombia in an article in Energy & Infrastructure Latin America 2013 entitled, “Colombia: tapping potential and battling bureaucracy”.

As quoted in the article:

If you could enact one regulatory reform in Colombia, what would it be?

It would be a law providing for a default issuance of permits and mineral titles. The law would kick in when a regulatory agency exceeds the allotted time to issue a permit. Permitting is part of modern mining. Most legislation in every jurisdiction says that a given agency has X number of months to process a permit request, approve it, deny it, or ask for more information. Typically the law goes one step further, so that if the agency does not do this, the permit issues by default and somebody in the agency gets his or her hand slapped for not acting on a timely basis, but the industry is not held hostage through inaction. Here is the biggest problem we grapple with in Colombia—their laws say we’ll issue this permit in X number of days. But the laws don’t say you’ll get the permit by default. Colombian Mines still has pending applications for mineral titles launched in January 2007 which under Colombian law, the regulatory agency should have had 180 days to process. I guess they just didn’t tell us which 180 days.

Read the full article here.
Click here to see the Colombian Mines Corporation (TSXV:CMJ) profile.