When Germany signed a deal last month to help Bolivia exploit its huge lithium reserves, it hailed the venture as a deepening of economic ties with the South American country. But it also gives Germany entry into the new “Great Game,” in which big powers like China are jostling across the globe for access to the prized electric battery metal.

The signing of the deal in Berlin on Dec. 12 capped two years of intense lobbying by Germany as it sought to persuade President Evo Morales’ government that a small German family-run company was a better bet than its Chinese rivals, according to Reuters interviews with German and Bolivian officials.

While the substance of the deal has been reported, how China, Bolivia’s biggest non-institutional lender and close ideological ally, lost out to Germany has not.

China has been quietly cornering the global lithium market, making deals in Asia, Chile and Argentina as it seeks to lock in access to a strategic resource that could power the next energy revolution.

China has invested $4.2 billion in South America in the past two years, surpassing the value of similar deals by Japanese and South Korean companies in the same period. Chinese entities now control nearly half of global lithium production and 60 percent of electric battery production capacity.

German officials told Reuters they championed the bid by ACI Systems GmbH because they saw an opportunity to lower Germany’s reliance on Asian battery makers and help its carmakers catch up with Chinese and U.S. rivals in the race to make electric cars.

The German push included a series of visits by German government officials who talked up the benefits of picking a German company. Bolivian officials also toured German battery factories, Bolivia’s deputy minister of High Energy Technologies, Luis Alberto Echazu, told Reuters.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier wrote a letter to Morales, an environmental champion, emphasizing Germany’s commitment to environment protection.

The lobbying effort was capped by a call last April between Altmaier and Morales, Bolivian, German and ACI officials said, without offering details of what was discussed.

German diplomats in La Paz also stressed high-level German government backing for the project, potential loan guarantees and the tantalizing prospect of supply agreements with German automakers, ACI and Bolivian officials told Reuters.

ACI’s win means Germany now has a foothold in the final frontier of South America’s so-called Lithium Triangle: the Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia, one of the world’s largest untapped deposits. The triangle comprises lithium deposits in an area that includes parts of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia.

“This partnership secures lithium supplies for us and breaks the Chinese monopoly,” Wolfgang Tiefensee, economy minister of the German state of Thuringia, an automotive manufacturing hub, told Reuters during a visit to the Bolivian capital La Paz in October.

Some risks

The venture in Bolivia is not without risk for ACI.

While Uyuni boasts at least 21 million tons of lithium, Morales has made nationalizing natural resources a key policy plank. Bolivian officials assured ACI that foreign investments in the Uyuni would be guaranteed should anything go awry, CEO Wolfgang Schmutz said in an interview.

In addition, unlike Chile’s sun-drenched Atacama salt flats, snow and rain slow the evaporation process needed to extract lithium from brine in Uyuni, and the landlocked nation will have to use a port in neighboring Chile or Peru to ship the metal out.

ACI, a family-run clean tech and machinery supplier, has no experience producing lithium. The company dismisses concerns from some lithium analysts about its ability to deliver, saying its small size gives it more flexibility to bring partners from different fields into the project.

Schmutz said the company has preliminary lithium supply deals with major German carmakers, but declined to provide details, citing non-disclosure agreements.

None of Germany’s top three carmakers — BMW, VW or Daimler — confirmed any agreement with ACI when contacted by Reuters.

BMW said it was in preliminary talks with ACI but had made no decision. VW said ensuring supplies and stable prices for raw materials was important, but noted lithium production in Bolivia was particularly demanding. Daimler board member Ola Kaellenius said: “If it’s happening, we’re not part of it.”

ACI said the carmakers that it was in talks with would not be able to confirm anything publicly until final deals were made.

The “Great Game” — lithium version

The global battle for control of lithium has been likened to the “Great Game,” the term coined to describe the struggle between Russia and Britain for influence and territory in Central Asia in the 19th century.

The Bolivian project includes plans to build a lithium hydroxide plant and a factory for producing electric car batteries in Bolivia. Once completed, the factory will help to fulfill Morales’ ambition to break with Bolivia’s historic role as a mere exporter of raw materials.

ACI has said it expects the lithium hydroxide plant to have an annual production capacity of 35,000-40,000 tons by the end of 2022, similar in output to plants operated by the world’s top lithium producers. Eighty percent of that would be exported to Germany.

ACI’s willingness to build a battery plant in Bolivia helped to seal the deal, said Echazu, the deputy minister.

The Chinese did not want to build a battery plant in Bolivia because they felt it made no economic sense to ship in materials to make the batteries only to re-import the final product to China, he said.

China’s embassy in La Paz declined to comment on the Uyuni project, but said the potential for future cooperation with Bolivia on lithium was “huge.”

Bolivia’s state-owned lithium producer YLB will own 51 percent of the new joint venture. Control of the project was another key demand of the Bolivians, who have bitter memories of foreign powers meddling in the former Spanish colony to seize its natural resources.

Juan Carlos Montenegro, the head of YLB, said geopolitics was a factor for Bolivia in deciding which companies to work with.

“We don’t want a single country to set the rules, we want balance and other world powers must help create that balance,” he said. “So for Bolivia, it’s important to have not just economic partners for markets, but geopolitical strategic partners.”

He stressed, however, that Bolivia had not been predisposed against China in deciding who had made the best offer.

“China-Bolivia relations are still good. China is present in every country in the world and impossible to avoid,” he said.
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Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced on Monday plans to increase the standard minimum monthly wage by about 11 percent, the first such hike since the country’s debt crisis erupted almost a decade ago.

The country emerged in August from its third international bailout since 2010 and the government, which faces a national election this year, has promised to reverse some of the unpopular reforms Greece implemented under bailout supervision.

“I’m calling on you, after a decade of wage cuts, to make another historic step,” Tsipras said, calling on his cabinet to approve the labor ministry’s proposal for an increase to 650 euros from 586 euros currently.

Tsipras, who was elected in 2015 pledging to end austerity but later signed up to Greece’s third bailout, also proposed the abolition of a youth minimum wage for those below 25.

Ministers applauded and a smiling Tsipras responded: “From your reaction I reckon that my proposal is … approved”.

The plan must be approved by parliament in the coming days to take effect next month, as the government hopes.

Athens had told its European lenders that it would reinstate the process of increasing the minimum wage periodically after the end of the bailout.

Greece slashed the standard minimum monthly wage by 22 percent to 586 euros in 2012, when it was mired in recession.

Workers below 25 years suffered deeper wage cut as part of measures prescribed by international lenders to make the labor market more flexible and the economy more competitive.

Greece expects 2.5 percent economic growth this year. “The minimum wage increase marks the beginning of a new era for Greek workers who carried the weight of the crisis on their shoulders,” Labor Minister Effie Acthsioglou told Reuters.

“This decision proves in practice what it means to have a leftist government at the country’s wheel.”

The government’s current term ends in October and Tsipras’ Syriza party is trailing the conservative New Democracy party by up to 12 points in opinion polls.

Labor unions said on Monday the suggested increase was far from offsetting the loss that workers suffered during the crisis. Employers also said that it should be combined with tax cuts and a reduction in social security contributions.

The International Monetary Fund urged Athens last week to introduce greater flexibility into the labour market to mitigate an expected negative impact from its new policies.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration on Sunday lifted sanctions on aluminum giant Rusal and other Russian firms linked to oligarch Oleg Deripaska, despite a Democratic-led push in the U.S. Congress to maintain the restrictions.

Earlier this month, 11 of Trump’s fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate joined Democrats in a failed effort to keep the sanctions on Rusal, its parent, En+ Group Plc, and power firm JSC EuroSibEnergo. But that was not enough to overcome opposition from Trump and most of his fellow Republicans.

Advocates for keeping the sanctions had argued that Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, retained too much control over the companies to lift sanctions imposed in April to punish Russia for actions including its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, efforts to interfere in U.S. elections and support for Syria’s government in its civil war.

Some lawmakers from both parties also said it was inappropriate to ease the sanctions while Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigates whether Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign colluded with Moscow.

But in its statement on Sunday, the U.S. Treasury Department said the three companies had reduced Deripaska’s direct and indirect shareholding stake and severed his control.

That action, it said, ensured that most directors on the En+ and Rusal boards would be independent directors, including Americans and Europeans, who had no business, professional or family ties to Deripaska or any other person designated for sanctions by the Treasury Department.

“The companies have also agreed to unprecedented transparency for Treasury into their operations by undertaking extensive, ongoing auditing, certification, and reporting requirements,” the department’s statement said.

Deripaska himself remains subject to U.S. sanctions.

Trump administration officials, and many Republicans who opposed the effort to keep the sanctions in place, said they worried about the impact on the global aluminum industry. They also said Deripaska’s decision to lower his stakes in the companies so that he no longer controlled them showed that the sanctions had worked.

Rusal is the world’s largest aluminum producer outside China. The sanctions on the company spurred demand for Chinese metal. China’s aluminum exports jumped to a record high in 2018.

Trump denies collusion, and Moscow has denied seeking to influence the U.S. election on Trump’s behalf, despite U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding that it did so.

Deripaska had ties with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. Manafort pleaded guilty in September 2018 to attempted witness tampering and conspiring against the United States.

 
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As the world commemorates the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on International Holocaust Remembrance Day Sunday, death camp survivor Cipora Feivlovich marks her own personal milestone as she turns 92.

Feivlovich has spent her most recent birthdays recounting to audiences in Israel and Germany her harrowing experiences in the camp, where her parents, brother and best friends all perished.

Despite witnessing daily atrocities and fearing that the toxic food and injections she was given would make her infertile, she eventually married her husband Pinchas, a fellow orphaned survivor, and started a new family. Today she has dozens of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.

“When we first met after the war he asked me if I thought I could have children after everything I went through in Auschwitz. And I said ‘I don’t promise anything. What the Lord gives is what will be,'” she recalled from her home in Jerusalem. “We understood each other. He always said he was lucky to marry me since I understood him.”

But for the following decades, as he obsessively wrote and lectured about his six-year Holocaust ordeal in multiple concentration camps and the trauma of losing eight siblings and his entire extended family, she kept quiet to try and raise their three children in Israel in relative normalcy. Only in the 1990s, long after the kids had moved out, did she finally start processing her own troubled history.

Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust, wiping out a third of world Jewry. Israel’s main Holocaust memorial day is in the spring — marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The United Nations designated Jan. 27 as the annual international commemoration, marking the date of Auschwitz’s liberation in 1945, the day Feivlovich turned 18.

She grew up in a Transylvanian village with a large Jewish population and lived a normal life until she was 14, when she and the other Jewish students were kicked out of school.

She said her family holed up in their home for the following years, fearful of their anti-Semitic neighbors, and naively waited for the storm to pass. But then the Nazis arrived in 1944, took them away in the middle of the night and crammed all Jewish residents into the local synagogue.

“Two days we sat on the floor, you couldn’t leave for the restrooms so people relieved themselves where they are sitting,” she recalled. “On both sides of the street the non-Jews were standing and clapping their hands saying: ‘Bravo, we are getting rid of the Jews.'”‘

After a brief stay in a Hungarian ghetto, they were deported on the three-day train ride to Auschwitz, with each cattle wagon packed shoulder to shoulder.

“My grandfather died there while standing. We couldn’t even lay him down. And in that miserable state we got to our final destination,” she said. There, they were greeted with barking dogs, screams and a warning: “Young mothers, hand your babies to grandmothers or aunts and maybe you will live.”

Feivlovich and her younger sister were thrown to one side, the boys to the other. They never saw their parents again.

The girls were ordered to strip. Their hair was cut and they were hosed with freezing water and marched outside naked, shivering with cold and shame.

“The Nazis are teasing us, spitting on us and watching us there miserable,” she said.

After finally getting dresses to wear, they were approached by a tall man in a polished uniform who introduced himself as Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi doctor. He pointed to a huge chimney spewing thick black smoke and told them anyone not essential to the Third Reich would go straight to the crematorium.

“I’m holding my sister’s hand, and we are shaking and crying and I ask: ‘Is this possible?'”  she remembered.

Starved and exhausted, she and hundreds of other Jewish prisoners were presented with a large liquid-filled barrel.

“The moment we took that first sip in our mouth, everyone started screaming insanely. It was like a million pins in your throat. You couldn’t swallow the soup,” she remembered. “But we learned to drink that poisoned soup since there was nothing else to eat.”

She said they were told it was laced with toxin to help kill off the Jewish race and prevent it from reproducing. Feivlovich said she believed it since she stopped menstruating for a long time after.

Those already pregnant faced an even worse fate. In one case, a pregnant relative named Sarah was not allowed to go to the infirmary and forced to give birth on the floor. Usually, the Nazis took Jewish newborns away, never to be seen again. But in this case, they ordered the mother to drown her own baby in a pail of water.

By the time Auschwitz was liberated, she had already been transported to forced labor in a German armament factory. Even there she wasn’t safe. The camp commander ordered her to receive a mysterious injection for talking back and refusing to make the Christian sign of the cross on herself.

She awoke after two days. By then, the war was winding down. The Nazis disappeared and soon an American tank broke through. Yiddish-speaking soldiers comforted the emaciated inmates.

Some 150,000 elderly survivors remain in Israel today, with a similar number worldwide.

Feivlovich said in recent years her birthday has become “obligating,” particularly since her husband passed away in 2007.

“My husband demanded of me: Don’t stop talking about the Holocaust, because if we don’t speak about it there will be enough Holocaust deniers after us,” she said. “It is true that 74 years have passed but we are still living and we are here.”

 
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Britain’s Prince Philip has apologized to woman who was injured when the car she was riding in collided with a Land Rover that he was driving.

The 97-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth II told the woman he was “deeply sorry” that she was injured in the Jan. 17 collision.

In the letter, published in the Sunday Mirror, Philip said he was dazzled by the sun when he entered a main road near the royal retreat in Sandringham in eastern England.

He wrote to Emma Fairweather, who suffered a broken wrist in the crash, that “I can only imagine that I failed to see the car coming, and I am very contrite about the consequences.”

Philip was unhurt although his car flipped over. He was not charged with any infraction and continues to drive.
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