Dr Duarte da Silva: The richest beggar on earth

South Africa holds 83% of the world’s platinum-group metal reserves and mines 81% of its new rhodium, yet it sets the price of none of them. That leaves miners, workers and the Treasury carrying the full cost of every price collapse, from thousands of lost jobs to royalties that fell 37% in 2024. In the second part of his platinum paper, Dr Duarte da Silva argues that the country should stop acting as a price-taker. He proposes eight lawful tools, among them a Johannesburg price, a sovereign metals reserve and supply contracts with buyers, that could put a floor under prices without creating a cartel..By Dr Duarte F da Silva*.If a country owns most of a metal the rich world cannot do without, why does it behave like a small producer with no say? The answer runs through the diamond fields of Kimberley, the silver pits of New York in 1980, the economics of exhaustible resources, the South African Competition Act, the rules of the World Trade Organization and the industrial policies of Washington, Brussels and Beijing. In July 2026 the United States imposed a new tariff on South African goods and, on the South African government's account, left its platinum-group metals out. The buyer has priced its dependence. The owner has not. The argument is controversial. Every proposal in it is lawful. .Eighty-three per cent of the world's platinum-group reserves, and no say in their price. South Africa also mines more than eight of every ten ounces of rhodium, a metal the developed world has written into law as critical, and sets the price of none of them. The price of its platinum is discovered in New York, London and, since November 2025, Guangzhou; the price of its rhodium, iridium and ruthenium is a dealer's quote. Rhodes, Barnato and Oppenheimer took a gemstone valued mainly for what it signified and controlled its price for most of a century. Their heirs hold the scarcest industrial metals on earth and take whatever the screen says. What economics and the law allow is a floor under the price, built from instruments that already exist in statute or in contract, and eight of them would let the country stop being a price-taker without becoming a cartel. .THE QUESTION I. The least commercial mineral power on earth? I will put the question as bluntly as it occurred to me. Is South Africa the least commercial mineral power on the planet? Of 76,000 tonnes of known platinum-group reserves in the world, 63,000 lie in South Africa, on the count the US Geological Survey published in January 2026. In 2025 the country mined about 71 per cent of the world's platinum, and on Johnson Matthey's count of May 2026 it supplied 566,000 of the 701,000 ounces of newly mined rhodium, 81 per cent, and “over 85%” of the world's primary ruthenium. These are not decorative metals. Washington's final list of critical minerals, published on 7 November 2025, names platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium. The European Union's Critical Raw Materials Act of 2024 classes the platinum-group metals as both critical and strategic. The rich world has written into its own statute books that it cannot run its cars, its chemical plants, its data centres or its hydrogen economy without what lies under the Bushveld. And yet the country does not set the price of a single one of these metals. The platinum price is discovered on the New York Mercantile Exchange and in the twice-daily London auctions that ICE Benchmark Administration took over from the London Metal Exchange on 1 July 2026. Since 27 November 2025 it is also discovered in Guangzhou, where China launched platinum and palladium futures because, in the World Platinum Investment Council's words, China had been “a price taker”. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange lists a platinum futures contract, but it is cash-settled in rand against the American price: a derivative of someone else's discovery. Rhodium, iridium and ruthenium have no exchange at all. Their prices are the base prices that Johnson Matthey publishes for Hong Kong, London and New York and the quotations of dealers such as Umicore. The buyer of the world's scarcest industrial metal built itself a price-discovery venue in 2025. The owner still has none. The cost of that passivity is not abstract. Between 2022 and April 2025 the basket of metals the Bushveld sells fell by about half, platinum touched about 895 dollars an ounce, and the producers cut thousands of jobs and closed shafts. On the Minerals Council's estimate, mining royalties paid to the state fell 37 per cent in 2024, to R16 billion, and total mining taxes halved to R43.6 billion, mainly because platinum-group prices had fallen. Nine months after the April low, on 26 January 2026, New York futures traders paid a record 2,923.70 dollars an ounce for platinum; on 15 October 2026 it closed at 1,622, forty-five per cent lower, a day after touching its lowest level since August. PwC's annual review of 6 October 2026 put the revenue of the platinum producers it covers at 429 billion rand for the year to June 2026, up 59 per cent on a dollar platinum price 80 per cent higher, from mines that still produce less than they did in 2019. The Treasury collected R9.7 billion in mining royalties between April and August 2026, against R3 billion a year earlier; and on 13 October 2026 Statistics South Africa reported mining production for August 12.7 per cent lower than a year before, with the platinum-group metals, down 6.1 per cent, the largest single drag. The royalty rose with the price and the output fell with it. A country that owns most of a metal is carrying the whole of its price cycle in its labour market and its budget, while the price is made by traders who carry none of it.The owner carries the whole of the price cycle. The traders who make the price carry none of it. EXHIBIT A · HOW THE DIAMOND MEN DID IT II. A gemstone, priced for most of a century The comparison that shames the present was made in Kimberley. De Beers Consolidated Mines was formed on 12 March 1888 with Cecil Rhodes as chairman. On 18 July 1889 Barney Barnato's Kimberley Central was wound up and paid out with a cheque for £5,338,650, financed by Rothschild and Beit money, and the richest diamond pipes in the world came under one roof. Ernest Oppenheimer became chairman in 1929, formed the Diamond Corporation in 1930 and, in 1934, the Central Selling Organisation: the single channel through which most of the world's rough diamonds were sold, at prices De Beers set, to buyers De Beers chose. When demand fell, the company bought and held stones to stop the price breaking. When demand was missing, it made it. In 1947 Frances Gerety, a copywriter at the N.W. Ayer agency, wrote “A Diamond Is Forever”, and a luxury became a social obligation. Two things about that century matter for platinum. The first is that the pricing power was designed. It rested on control of supply, a single marketing channel, stock held against the cycle and demand deliberately created, and each was built on purpose by people who understood that the value of a scarce thing depends on who sells it and how. The second is that it ended, and why. The United States Department of Justice sued in 1945; in 2004 De Beers Centenary pleaded guilty in an American court to fixing prices of industrial diamonds and paid a ten-million-dollar fine, and a class settlement of 295 million dollars was approved in 2008 and took effect in 2012, after appeals. In Brussels the Commission made binding, on 22 February 2006, De Beers' commitment to phase out its purchases from Russia's Alrosa. In 2000 the company abandoned custodianship of the market for its “Supplier of Choice” strategy, and its share of rough sales, about 63 per cent that year on most estimates, has since fallen to roughly a quarter. Entry by new producers and the reach of foreign competition law ended the single channel. Nothing in its history suggests that pricing power, once built, survives without being defended. The lineage is closer to platinum than most readers know. The Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company that Barnato founded in 1889 managed Rustenburg Platinum from its early years; in the restructuring of 1995 its platinum interests passed into Anglo American Platinum, which Anglo demerged as Valterra in May 2025 and sold out of entirely on 4 September 2025. The largest platinum producer of the last half-century descends, by corporate succession, from Barnato's company. The instinct for price did not come with it. There is also a living lesson from the diamond fields, and it is not South African. Botswana used its ownership of Debswana to renegotiate its terms with De Beers: under the agreement signed on 25 February 2025 the state's Okavango Diamond Company takes 30 per cent of Debswana's output in the first five years and 40 per cent in the next five, rising to 50 per cent if the agreement is extended, and the mining licences run to 2054. A state that owns the ground used that ownership to take a larger share of the selling. South Africa owns more of the platinum-group metals than Botswana owns of diamonds, and has asked for nothing comparable. The richest beggar on earth sells the scarcest metals on earth at whatever price it is shown. EXHIBIT B · THE DIAGNOSIS III. Why the owner behaves like a price-taker The reasons are structural, and none of them is geological. The first is ownership. Diamonds had one seller. The Bushveld has four major listed producers, Valterra, Impala, Sibanye-Stillwater and Northam, whose shareholders are dispersed across Johannesburg, London and New York and who compete for the same customers. Each is individually too small to hold back supply and legally forbidden to coordinate with the others. The second is the state's own toolkit. Its principal claim on the metal is a royalty under the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Royalty Act of 2008: a formula that starts at half a per cent and rises with profitability to a cap of 5 per cent for refined metal and 7 per cent for unrefined concentrate. A royalty is a share of whatever price the market sets, not a say in it. The third is the venue. With no exchange, no auction and no benchmark in Johannesburg, every price signal the country receives is made abroad, in dollars, by participants whose positions have nothing to do with the cost of a stope in Rustenburg. The country has noticed the problem before and let it go. At the BRICS summit in Durban in March 2013 the mining ministers of South Africa and Russia, Susan Shabangu and Sergey Donskoy, discussed coordinating their platinum policies; South Africa's minister said the aim was to “influence the markets” without creating a cartel. The idea died within months. Russia wanted to expand the market and South Africa wanted higher prices and taxes, and an analyst quoted at the time asked the question nobody answered: “How are they going to establish a bloc such as this, and how are they going to break existing contracts?” The Beneficiation Strategy of June 2011 set out five priority value chains, and the platinum-group metals sit in two of them, autocatalysts and jewellery. The Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy approved by Cabinet and released on 20 May 2025 rates platinum as highly critical. Neither says who should set the price. Gold is the warning. In 1970 South Africa mined about seventy per cent of all the gold produced on earth. In 2025 it produced about 90 tonnes of a world total of 3,672, roughly two and a half per cent. Whatever pricing power that dominance might have conferred was never used, and it is now gone for good: no gold producer of that size sets anything. The platinum-group metals are the country's second and probably last chance to own a market instead of merely supplying one. The question is whether it will use the position while it still holds it. A royalty is a share of whatever price the market sets. It is not a say in the price. EXHIBIT C · WHAT ECONOMICS SAYS IV. Scarcity rent, inelastic demand and the limits of both Economics has names for what South Africa is failing to collect. Harold Hotelling's paper of 1931, “The Economics of Exhaustible Resources”, showed that the owner of a finite resource earns a scarcity rent, a return over and above the cost of extraction that exists because an ounce sold today cannot be sold tomorrow. In a competitive market that rent should rise over time at the rate of interest. Hotelling himself noticed, on the second page of that paper, the “retarding influence of monopolies and combinations” on the exploitation of irreplaceable resources. The later literature turned his aside into a proposition: a monopolist, by restricting output to raise price, extracts a finite resource more slowly than a competitive industry would. The idea is usually summarised, after Robert Solow's Ely lecture of 1974, as the monopolist being the conservationist's friend. Joseph Stiglitz showed in 1976 that the result depends on the shape of demand, and that with constant elasticity and no extraction cost the monopolist and the market deplete at the same rate. The defensible conclusion is narrower than the slogan, and still useful: market power need not hasten depletion, and it can slow it. The second tool is Abba Lerner's. In 1934 Lerner showed that the margin a seller with market power can hold above marginal cost is the inverse of the elasticity of demand it faces. Where buyers cannot easily stop buying, the margin is large. This is the heart of the platinum-group case, because the demand for the minor metals is among the most inelastic in the commodity world. A 2025 study in Mineral Economics that estimated demand elasticities for seventy-four minerals, platinum, palladium and rhodium among them, found short-run elasticities between −0.03 and −0.51: every commodity inelastic in the short run. Johnson Matthey said the same thing in plain English in May 2021, two months after rhodium reached nearly 30,000 dollars an ounce: “most rhodium consumers (with the exception of the glass industry) have little or no short-term ability to flex their rhodium usage.” A few grams of rhodium in an autocatalyst, or of ruthenium in a hard disk, or of iridium in the crucible that grows a single crystal, are a trivial share of the finished product's cost and cannot be removed next quarter. The third tool belongs to trade theory. Harry Johnson's “Optimum Tariffs and Retaliation” of 1953 formalised a result that goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century: a country large enough to affect the world price of what it exports can raise its national income by taxing those exports, up to a rate set by the inverse of the foreign elasticity of demand, provided its trading partners do not retaliate. The optimal-tariff literature is usually cited as a warning against beggar-thy-neighbour policy. For an exporter with four-fifths of world supply and buyers whose short-run demand barely moves, it is also a description of money left on the table. Against these three tools stand four constraints. The first is Ronald Coase's. In “Durability and Monopoly” (1972) Coase argued that a monopolist selling a durable good competes with its own past sales and cannot hold its price. Platinum-group metals are the most durable of goods: nearly every ounce ever sold is still in a catalyst, a jewel or a vault, and much of it comes back. Recycling supplied 22 per cent of platinum and 31 per cent of rhodium in 2025, on Johnson Matthey's figures, and 32 per cent of palladium. The second is Richard Gilbert's. In 1978 Gilbert showed that a dominant producer facing a competitive fringe can price only as high as the fringe allows. Russia supplied about 12 per cent of platinum and 10 per cent of rhodium in 2025, and in palladium it is the larger producer, with 44 per cent of mine output to South Africa's 37 on the Geological Survey's figures. The third is George Stigler's. His “Theory of Oligopoly” (1964) explained why cartels crumble: each member gains by cheating in secret. The fourth is time. Demand that is inelastic next quarter is elastic over a decade. Long-run platinum elasticity has been estimated at about −1.15, and the rhodium spike of March 2021 taught carmakers and glassmakers to use less of it, until by late 2024 the price had fallen below 5,000. History enforces the same lessons. The International Tin Council, which defended a price with a buffer stock financed by borrowing, announced on 24 October 1985 that it could not pay its debts, defaulting on about 900 million pounds. Silver taught the lesson from the buyer's side. From 1979 the Hunt brothers of Texas bought silver on borrowed money until the London fix reached 49.45 dollars on 18 January 1980; COMEX changed its rules against them, the Federal Reserve restrained credit in March, and on 27 March the price closed at 10.80 dollars. A New York jury found against the Hunts in 1988, and two of the brothers filed for bankruptcy that year. The International Coffee Agreement's quotas were suspended in July 1989 and prices fell by about 40 per cent. Alhajji and Huettner, testing OPEC's record from 1973 to 1994, found that neither OPEC nor its core behaved as a dominant producer; only Saudi Arabia fitted the model. And a 2024 study for MIT's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research found that a cartel of copper exporters would earn about one and a half times the profits of competition over forty-five years, but would do better than competition only after the first two decades. Commodity power is real, slow and fragile. Every failed attempt to hold a metal price cited here ran on debt: the tin council borrowed, the Hunts bought on margin. A prudential rule becomes a design principle: no leverage. The theory points away from a cartel. Hotelling says the owner is entitled to a scarcity rent and is not collecting it. Lerner and Johnson say the rent is largest where demand is least elastic, which is in the minor metals and in the short run. Coase, Gilbert, Stigler and the history of tin say that any attempt to hold the price high will be undone by recycling, rivals, cheating and substitution. The policy that survives all of them is not a high price. It is a floor: an instrument that stops the price collapsing below the cost of sustaining supply, that captures rent in the downturn and does not gouge in the upturn, and that therefore does not provoke the substitution that high prices invite. John Maynard Keynes proposed this in his wartime memorandum on the international control of raw materials, which argued for buffer stocks that buy when prices are low and sell when they are high. The tin council failed because it defended a price above cost with borrowed money and no control of supply. A buffer designed around cost, funded with equity and matched to a dominant share of supply is a different instrument. The policy that survives Coase, Gilbert and the history of tin is not a high price. It is a floor. EXHIBIT D · WHAT THE LAW ALLOWS V. Price-fixing is forbidden. Who forbids it, and what they allow themselves The instinctive answer to my opening question, that price-fixing is illegal, is correct and incomplete. It is illegal for companies. Section 4(1)(b) of South Africa's Competition Act of 1998 prohibits outright any agreement between competitors “directly or indirectly fixing a purchase or selling price or any other trading condition”, dividing markets or rigging tenders. A firm can be fined up to 10 per cent of its South African turnover, and since 1 May 2016 a director who causes or knowingly permits cartel conduct commits a criminal offence. If the four producers agreed tomorrow to hold platinum off the market, they would be breaking the law in South Africa and, because their metal is sold into America and Europe, abroad as well. But the same Act makes room for exports. Section 10(3)(b) allows an agreement to be exempted where it contributes to “maintenance or promotion of exports”, among other listed objectives, and on 12 December 2025 the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition used that power. Government Gazette 53822 published a Block Exemption for the Promotion of Exports, for five years, covering agreements that would otherwise fall under sections 4(1)(a), 4(1)(b)(i) and (ii) and 5(1). It allows qualifying exporters to market South African goods collectively and to share logistics and infrastructure, and it allows them to negotiate or contract jointly with overseas buyers “where such engagement is required or requested by foreign governments”. It applies to export markets only. It does not extend to market allocation, collusive tendering or resale price maintenance on goods sold to end customers; participants must obtain the Competition Commission's written confirmation before they implement an arrangement; and it says nothing about foreign competition law, against which it can give no protection. South African law already contains the door. Nobody in the platinum industry has walked through it. The foreign position is where the controversy lives, and it is less one-sided than the rich world's rhetoric suggests. The United States has exempted its own export cartels since the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918, which provides that the Sherman Act does not make illegal “an association entered into for the sole purpose of engaging in export trade”, so long as it does not restrain trade within the United States. When the sellers are foreign, American courts are less forgiving. In Animal Science Products v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical, decided by the Supreme Court on 14 June 2018, Chinese vitamin C exporters faced a 147-million-dollar treble-damages judgment for fixing export prices; the Court held that the Chinese government's statement that its law required the conduct deserved “respectful consideration” but not conclusive weight, and the Second Circuit threw the judgment out again in 2021 on grounds of international comity. Where the conduct is the act of a sovereign and not a private agreement, the calculation changes further: in IAM v. OPEC (1981) the Ninth Circuit declined, under the act-of-state doctrine, to judge the price policy of OPEC's member states, and the NOPEC bill that would have removed that protection has been introduced repeatedly and never enacted. The European Union applies its competition law to cartels outside Europe whose agreements are implemented inside it, under the Wood Pulp judgment of 1988 and the qualified-effects test the Court of Justice accepted in Intel in 2017. For South Africa the line is clear. Private collusion is exposed everywhere; transparent state policy, and contracts negotiated with the buyers themselves, are not. The trade rules draw a similar line. Article XI:1 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade prohibits export “prohibitions or restrictions other than duties, taxes or other charges”. Quotas and bans are forbidden; export duties are not, and South Africa, unlike China, has made no commitment in its schedule to forgo them. China lost China — Raw Materials in 2012 and China — Rare Earths in 2014 largely because its accession protocol had committed it to eliminate export duties; the Appellate Body held that the conservation exception of Article XX(g), which requires restrictions to be “made effective in conjunction with restrictions on domestic production or consumption”, could not rescue measures that broke that promise. Indonesia first banned exports of nickel ore in 2014, relaxed the ban in 2017 and reimposed it from 1 January 2020; it lost before a WTO panel on 30 November 2022, appealed into an Appellate Body that no longer sits, and now produces about two-thirds of the world's mined nickel, with a smelting industry that has grown from two plants before 2014 to dozens. The one constraint South Africa must respect is its own: Article 26 of the Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and the Southern African Development Community allows new export duties on goods going to the Union only in exceptional circumstances, temporarily and after consultation. South African law is not starting from nothing. The Diamond Export Levy Act of 2007 imposes a 5 per cent levy on exports of unpolished diamonds to support local beneficiation. The Precious Metals Act of 2005 defines platinum-group metals as precious metals, charges its regulator with promoting their orderly local beneficiation, and requires ministerial approval to export them. Section 26 of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act says that “the Minister may initiate or promote the beneficiation of minerals in the Republic” and that anyone who wants to beneficiate South African minerals abroad may do so only after written notice to and consultation with the Minister. On 1 July 2025 Cabinet approved export controls and an export tax on chrome in principle, and the revised industrial strategy published in June 2026 calls for a chrome “export tax and quota”. The state is preparing to tax the export of chrome, the lower-value co-product of the same UG2 reef, while leaving the rhodium and ruthenium in that reef to be priced by dealers in London. Private collusion is exposed everywhere. Transparent state policy, and contracts negotiated with the buyers themselves, are not.EXHIBIT E · WHAT THE BUYERS ARE DOING VI. Price floors are price-setting, when the buyer does it The countries that would object loudest to a South African price policy are already setting prices themselves. On 10 July 2025 the United States Department of Defense agreed with MP Materials, the American rare-earth producer, a price floor of 110 dollars a kilogram for neodymium-praseodymium oxide for ten years, a 400-million-dollar preferred-equity investment that made the Department its largest shareholder with about 15 per cent, and the purchase of the whole output of a new magnet plant for a decade. On 4 February 2026, at a critical-minerals ministerial, the United States proposed a preferential trading zone in which “reference prices” would act as floors, maintained by adjustable tariffs, and the Trade Representative asked on 26 February for comments on a plurilateral agreement to that end. The G7's Critical Minerals Action Plan of 17 June 2025 says that markets should “reflect the real costs of responsible extraction”. That is the argument for a floor, made by the buyers. The MP Materials agreement is one entry in a longer ledger, and the ledger is the argument. State equity, a price floor, a guaranteed offtake, a sovereign stockpile, a concentration benchmark and a tariff exemption for the metal that matters: each of the instruments proposed in Section IX now has a working precedent among the buyers, dated after January 2025, and the table sets them out. .What the buyers have done, May 2024 to July 2026. Every instrument proposed in Section IX has a precedent on this list, set by a government that would object to South Africa using it. Sources in the note on the figures. Brussels has gone further in a direction that matters directly to South Africa. The Critical Raw Materials Act, in force since 23 May 2024, sets a benchmark that by 2030 no more than 65 per cent of the Union's consumption of any strategic raw material should come from a single third country. South Africa supplies far more than that share of the world's primary rhodium, ruthenium and platinum, so European law has declared the country a concentration risk to be reduced. On 9 October 2026 the Commission named 46 more strategic projects under the Act, all of them inside the Union, and the commissioner responsible gave the policy in a sentence: “reduce dependency, increase production in Europe.” That is a threat, and it is also leverage: on 20 November 2025 the two signed a Clean Trade and Investment Partnership with a minerals value-chain agreement attached. The buyers have told the seller, in statute, how much they need it. The seller has not yet named a price for that security. China is the second buyer, and the reason the seller has a choice. Beijing built its own platinum and palladium contracts in November 2025, and from 1 May 2026 it extended zero-tariff treatment to imports from 53 African countries, South Africa among them. Its platinum imports rose 17.8 per cent in the first half of 2026, to 48.18 tonnes, with South Africa the largest supplier, and the August customs data, the latest published, show 8.1 tonnes in the month, 11.6 per cent more than a year earlier, with palladium imports up 74 per cent. China has also shown both edges of supply leverage: its rare-earth export controls of 9 October 2025 brought Washington to a truce at Busan three weeks later, and also provoked the stockpiles, equity stakes and European benchmark described above. The lesson for a seller is to trade dependence for contracts and investment while the dependence is high, and never to withhold supply. The most persuasive evidence of South Africa's position is in Washington's own tariff schedules. The Supreme Court struck down the emergency-powers tariffs, among them the 30 per cent levy on South African goods, in Learning Resources v. Trump on 20 February 2026. Their temporary replacement expired on 23 July, and on 24 July a 12.5 per cent tariff under Section 301 took effect on South African goods. On the account the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition gave on 27 July, the exemptions include critical minerals and platinum-group and precious metals; vehicles and wine were not spared. Semafor reported on 21 September 2026 that platinum-group metals make up more than a third of South Africa's exports to the United States. The governments' wider quarrels are not argued here. The buyer has already priced its dependence, in the form of an exemption, and the owner collected nothing for it. The only primary platinum-group mines in the United States, Stillwater and East Boulder in Montana, belong to the Johannesburg-listed Sibanye-Stillwater, which asked Washington for duties on Russian palladium; on 29 May 2026 the International Trade Commission found no material injury, and the company has appealed. America's own supply of these metals, at home as well as abroad, runs through South African hands. This settles the question of legitimacy. It is now orthodox, in Washington, Brussels and the G7, that a critical mineral's price should cover the cost of responsible, secure supply, and that states may intervene to make it do so. A South African policy built on the same principle would be speaking the buyers' own language. If Washington can guarantee a price for magnet metals, Pretoria can ask it to guarantee one for rhodium. In July 2026 Washington taxed South Africa's wine and cars. On the South African government's account, it spared the platinum. EXHIBIT F · THE ESG CASE VII. Stability as a social licence Environmental, social and governance analysis usually treats commodity power with suspicion, and it should: price-gouging on the metals of the energy transition would slow the transition. But the social costs of the present system fall on South Africa, and they are measurable. The price collapse of 2023 to early 2025 was met with retrenchments in the thousands, and even after the recovery, 1,114 jobs were put at risk in September 2026 when Sibanye-Stillwater began consulting on the future of its Kwezi shaft. The belt's worst day was the killing of 34 striking miners at Lonmin's Marikana mine in August 2012, and the Farlam Commission, reporting on 25 June 2015 on the 44 deaths of that week, found against the company on its failure to deliver the housing promised in its social and labour plan. When the price falls below the cost of sustaining supply, the first commitments to go are the ones owed to workers and communities. A floor, a buffer and a longer-term contract are also the conditions under which social and labour plans can be funded through the cycle instead of abandoned at its bottom. The industry already has the governance to support a premium for responsible supply: the London Platinum and Palladium Market's Responsible Platinum and Palladium Guidance, published in July 2018 and in force from 1 January 2019, applies the OECD's five-step due-diligence framework to every refiner that wants its bars accepted in London. And South Africa has its own precedent for owners capturing mineral rent: the Royal Bafokeng Nation, whose royalty from Impala, more than a fifth of taxable income, was converted into Impala shares in 2006 and 2007, turned a claim on a share of the price into ownership. The governance test for every instrument proposed below is the same: it must stabilise, not spike; it must be rule-based and published, and its proceeds must be visibly used for the people who carry the cycle. One thing the country does not have is a sovereign wealth fund to hold them. The President first proposed one in August 2018; in 2024 he said the fiscal position made it the wrong time; and on 5 September 2026 the Development Bank of Southern Africa was reported to be starting a feasibility study, with platinum-group metals named as a possible source of capital. The instruments below are therefore designed to work with institutions that exist today. When the price falls below the cost of sustaining supply, the first commitments to go are the ones owed to workers and communities. EXHIBIT G · THE CARETAKERS VIII. Caretakers, not leaders Every instrument in the next section has an owner who could have picked it up years ago. None has. The record of each is public, and it is not flattering. The exchange comes first. The JSE lists platinum futures, but they are cash-settled in rand on the price set by the New York Mercantile Exchange's COMEX division. Nothing is delivered in Johannesburg and nothing is discovered there. It lists nothing at all in rhodium, iridium or ruthenium, the metals in which the country's share is highest. Guangzhou, in a country that mines almost none of these metals, launched platinum and palladium futures and options in November 2025 so that China would stop taking a price made elsewhere, and opened them to foreign investors on 28 September 2026. The JSE's commodity derivatives business earned 94 million rand in 2025, less than 3 per cent of the exchange's operating income of 3.5 billion rand and one of the slower-growing of its trading lines; the exchange nonetheless reported record results and paid out 85.6 per cent of its earnings, including a special dividend. It has shrunk to about 280 listed companies; some 500 delisted between 1989 and 2024, and six new companies listed in 2025. An exchange that has let its own companies go has made no attempt to hold on to its own metal. On platinum the JSE is a post box: it forwards New York's price and keeps the stamp. The fund managers who trade on that exchange deserve the same scrutiny, because they shape the behaviour they later complain about. When the offshore ceiling for retirement funds under Regulation 28 rose from 30 to 45 per cent in February 2022, the industry's advisers called it “a very positive development”; by September 2024 Old Mutual was warning of 9 billion rand at risk from a single client restructuring an offshore mandate. In October 2023, near the bottom of the platinum cycle, Coronation, one of the country's largest managers, published its explanation of why it held no platinum-group shares at all. In May 2024 Anglo American, pressed by shareholders to shed its less profitable businesses and fighting off a bid from BHP, announced that it would leave platinum, and it sold its last shares in Valterra in September 2025. In the recovery the four producers paid their owners 44.5 billion rand in dividends for the year to June 2026, Valterra distributing 70 per cent of headline earnings. Investors who reward cash returned, sell at the bottom and send the savings of a nation abroad cannot then blame management for the absence of long-term investment at home. They set the incentive. They own the result. Investors who reward cash returned and sell at the bottom cannot blame management for the absence of long-term investment. They set the incentive. The state has had its chances and taken none. It raised producer cooperation with Moscow at the BRICS summit in Durban in 2013 and then dropped it. Its Beneficiation Strategy of 2011 was about processing, not price. Its Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy of May 2025 notes once that dominance in platinum-group metals “presents opportunities for market influence”, and then names no institution to act on it and no instrument to use. The sovereign wealth fund that ought to own a metals reserve has been promised since 2018 and does not exist. When Washington imposed its tariff in July 2026, Pretoria asked for, and on its own account obtained, an exemption for platinum-group metals. It asked to be spared a tax. It did not ask to be paid for security. Its attention has been elsewhere, and the record says why. The Zondo Commission found in April 2022 that the minister of mineral resources appointed in 2015 “must have been appointed” at the instance or with the blessing of the Gupta family. Since September 2025 the Madlanga Commission has been hearing evidence of criminality and political interference in the criminal justice system. A state still establishing who captured its own minerals ministry cannot be trusted with discretion over a metals reserve, which is why every instrument here runs on published rules, an independent manager and existing law, and none on a minister's judgement. The producers are price-takers by habit as much as by law. Rustenburg Platinum's metal was marketed by Johnson Matthey from 1931. Anglo American Platinum paid about 100 million dollars in discounts and commissions under that agreement in 2011 alone and ended it in 2013, and its marketing then passed to Anglo Platinum Marketing Limited, a company incorporated in London in 2008 and renamed Valterra Platinum Marketing in May 2025. The largest platinum producer on earth runs its metal marketing through a company registered in London. The producers fund the World Platinum Investment Council, whose head office is also in London. None of them today funds a Johannesburg price, publishes a producer price or proposes a floor. In the downturn of 2023 and 2024 their answer was the only one available to a price-taker: close shafts and cut jobs. In the recovery it was to pay out. Returning cash is a board's right. Spending none of it on the price at which all future cash will be earned is a choice. Behind the producers stands the state again, as owner. The Public Investment Corporation, which invests the pensions of public servants, held 20.42 per cent of Sibanye-Stillwater in October 2025 and about 20.5 per cent of Northam in July 2026. I have found no public statement in which it has asked either board what the company is doing about the price it receives. Leadership is the most disturbing absence of all. At the industry's own gathering in Johannesburg in March 2026, Valterra's chief executive, Craig Miller, told the room what the industry needs: “a price of $2,000 to $2,500 to incentivise new greenfields projects”, sustained, to earn the 10 per cent return it seeks. It is a statement of dependence, made in public. The head of the world's largest platinum producer named the price he must be given; in the published reports of that day, none of the chief executives present described how the country that owns the metal might secure it. Seven months later, on 15 October 2026, with Valterra nearing a decision to take Mogalakwena, the largest platinum mine on earth, underground, he told Bloomberg that “the supply is not a concern”. Supply has never been the concern. The price is. This belt was built by people who did not wait for the price. Hans Merensky found the reef in 1924; the Johannesburg Consolidated Investment Company built Rustenburg Platinum around it; Union Corporation, with the Industrial Development Corporation among its partners, took Impala from a lease to production by 1969; Oppenheimer's house built a selling system for diamonds that set the price for most of a century. Their successors run the same assets at the mercy of the cycle. The exchange forwards another market's price, the fund managers reward the payout, the state asks for exemptions, and the producers wait. Every one of them is a caretaker. Not one is leading. The builders asked what the metal should be worth. The caretakers ask what the screen says. EXHIBIT H · THE PROGRAMME IX. Eight lawful instruments What follows is ordered from least to most contentious. None requires a new Act; each rests on a power that already exists or on a contract freely made, and each names who must act. Together they would turn a price-taker into a price-maker without creating the private cartel that South African and foreign law forbid. The first is a Johannesburg price. A physically settled platinum and palladium contract, in dollars and in rand, deliverable into South African vaults, together with a regular auction for rhodium, iridium and ruthenium run by an independent benchmark administrator, would bring price discovery to the place where most of the metal is produced. It needs a licensed exchange and an administrator, and no statute. China did this in November 2025 to stop being a price-taker. The owner has more reason to do it than the buyer. Other people's venues make the case: in January 1980 COMEX rewrote its rules in the middle of the Hunts' squeeze, and on 8 March 2022 the London Metal Exchange suspended nickel and cancelled every trade made that morning, a decision the English courts upheld in 2023 and 2024. A price made on someone else's exchange is made under someone else's rules. The venue proposed here would publish its rules in advance, and nothing in this programme borrows to hold a price. Who acts: the board of the JSE, which is licensed by the Financial Sector Conduct Authority under the Financial Markets Act of 2012 and needs no new law to list a contract; and the four producers, because a venue without metal is a screen. The whole instrument turns on that metal. An exchange does not create a price; delivered metal does. London prices platinum because metal sits in London vaults and is delivered against London contracts; Guangzhou's contracts were launched with Chinese refiners and importers already committed to deliver into them. A Johannesburg contract listed without that commitment would trade thin, settle rarely and be ignored, and the JSE's cash-settled platinum future is the proof: it exists, and nobody discovers a price on it. So the producers' commitment is not an accessory to the exchange. It is the exchange. What is needed is a coordinated delivery contract: each of the four producers undertaking, on the same terms and for the same term, to sell a stated share of its refined platinum and palladium (say a fifth of output, which on 2025 production is about 24 tonnes, some 770,000 ounces, roughly 1.25 billion dollars a year at the 15 October 2026 close of 1,622 dollars) through the Johannesburg contract, delivered into an accredited South African vault, with the balance sold as now. The commitment is to a venue and a volume, not to a price: the metal still clears at whatever the contract discovers, which is why it sits well inside the Competition Act and far from the collusion that section 4(1)(b) forbids, and why the Commission should be asked to confirm as much before the first ounce is delivered. Nothing in it costs a producer margin, because the ounce is sold at a world price either way; what it costs is the habit of selling through Johnson Matthey's channels and against New York's screen, which is a habit ninety-five years old. The commitment has to be coordinated because no producer will make it alone. A single producer delivering into an empty venue takes a liquidity discount for the privilege of building a market its competitors then use free; four producers delivering together make the market on day one. That is a collective-action problem, and the country has two owners placed to solve it. The Public Investment Corporation holds a fifth of Sibanye-Stillwater and of Northam, and can instruct as a shareholder what it cannot command as a state; and the Minerals Council exists to do what no member can do on its own. The precedents are the country's. De Beers ran a single channel for a century. The Chamber of Mines founded Rand Refinery in 1920 so that every ounce of the Rand's gold passed through one door, and in 1969 the owner of most of the world's gold negotiated, with the IMF, where and at what floor its new metal would be sold. Ghana buys 30 per cent of its large mines' gold through GoldBod, under an agreement with the miners. South Africa need not legislate a share. It need only have four boards sign the same contract on the same day. Who acts: the four producer boards, jointly, on a delivery undertaking of not less than three years; the PIC as the shareholder that puts it to the vote; the Minerals Council as the table at which it is drafted; and the Competition Commission, which confirms in advance that a commitment of volume to a venue is not an agreement on price. The second is a minor-metals export consortium. Under the Block Exemption of 12 December 2025, the producers could market rhodium, iridium and ruthenium abroad jointly once the Competition Commission confirms that the arrangement is covered. Joint negotiation and contracting with foreign buyers is exempt only where a foreign government requires or requests it, so the consortium depends on the fifth instrument below: a buyer government that wants a supply compact must ask for a single counterparty. The consortium would sell only abroad, publish its contracting principles, admit a state observer, and negotiate price bands with buyers without restricting supply against them. That design keeps it within the exemption at home and far from the private price-fixing that American and European courts punish. This is the instrument closest to the line, and it should be the last built. Who acts: the boards of Valterra, Impala, Sibanye-Stillwater and Northam, which must apply jointly; and the Competition Commission, which must confirm that the arrangement falls within the exemption before a single contract is signed. The third is a Sovereign Metals Reserve on Keynes's model. A rule-based buffer, held in a ring-fenced company owned by the Industrial Development Corporation and funded with equity and not debt, would buy refined platinum and minor metals when prices fall below a published measure of the industry's sustaining cost and sell into spikes above a published ceiling. Buying metal is not an export restriction and raises no competition issue. It would have been buying in April 2025, when platinum was near 895 dollars and shafts were closing, and selling in January 2026, when it was near 2,900. The International Tin Council failed because its band was set above cost, financed with borrowing and unsupported by any control of supply; this reserve would set its band around cost, hold equity, and sit behind four-fifths of the world's rhodium. The Industrial Development Corporation is the right owner because it exists, has its own balance sheet, and has done this kind of thing before: it was among the founding shareholders when Union Corporation brought Impala into production in 1969. Who acts: the Minister of Finance issues the mandate and seeks any appropriation from Parliament, preferably a share of the platinum-group royalty; the IDC's board establishes the company; an independent manager is appointed by open tender. If a sovereign wealth fund is ever created, the reserve can be transferred to it. A sovereign holder has moved a platinum-group price before. Russian palladium shipments were limited in 1997 and delayed again in 2000, and in late January 2001 palladium reached about 1,090 dollars at the London fix, with the size of Russia's state stocks treated as a state secret. Johnson Matthey estimated sales from those stocks at 1,000,000 ounces in 2010. What Moscow did in secret, a South African reserve would do by published rule. The floor can be shown. Impala Platinum earned 39,478 rand for each 6E ounce it sold in the year to June 2021, against a unit cost of 14,840. By the year to June 2025 revenue had fallen to 25,172 rand an ounce against a unit cost of 22,491, and in the year to June 2026 it recovered to 38,116 against 24,249. A reserve that bought when revenue fell below one and a quarter times unit cost, and sold above twice unit cost, would have sold into 2021 and 2022 and bought through 2024 and 2025, the years in which shafts were closed and jobs cut. The band is illustrative and uses one producer's costs; a working reserve would publish an industry-wide measure in advance. .Impala Platinum, revenue per 6E ounce sold divided by group unit cost per 6E ounce, financial years to June. Green bars are years in which the illustrative rule (buy below 1.25 times unit cost) would have bought; rust bars are years in which it would have sold (above 2.0 times). Unit cost is not all-in sustaining cost. Source: Impala Platinum annual results, FY2021–FY2026. The fourth is a variable export duty on unrefined concentrate and matte, not on refined metal. Duties are lawful under Article XI of the GATT and South Africa has no schedule commitment against them; the Diamond Export Levy is the domestic precedent; and a duty weighted by the rhodium, iridium and ruthenium content of what leaves the country unrefined would apply Johnson's optimal-tariff logic where foreign demand is least elastic, while rewarding refining at home. Exports to the European Union would require the consultation that Article 26 of the Economic Partnership Agreement prescribes, and that consultation is better begun than avoided. Who acts: the Minister of Finance, who can add a duty to Part 6 of Schedule 1 to the Customs and Excise Act on the recommendation of the International Trade Administration Commission, as was done for scrap metal from 1 August 2021; the South African Revenue Service, which collects it; and the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, who must open the consultation with Brussels. The fifth is a set of security-for-price compacts. The United States, the European Union and Japan have each declared these metals critical. South Africa should offer each of them what the Department of Defense gave MP Materials: long-term supply contracts with a floor and a ceiling, a collar, in exchange for security of supply, and with co-investment in refining and recycling in South Africa. The European Union's strategic-project process and the Clean Trade and Investment Partnership of November 2025 are the channels; America's reference-price proposal of February 2026 is the template. If the buyers want to reduce their dependence on one country below 65 per cent, they can pay for the privilege of choosing that country as a partner. Pretoria has already made the pitch in its own words. “Come and let's have a mutually beneficial relationship where you undertake processing in South Africa,” the trade ministry's spokesman, Kaamil Alli, told Semafor in September 2026. Who acts: the Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition leads the negotiation, with the Department of International Relations and the Presidency; the producers sign the contracts, because only they can deliver the metal. The sixth is a regional compact with Zimbabwe, not with Russia. Zimbabwe holds 1,300 tonnes of platinum-group reserves and mined 18 tonnes of platinum in 2025; with South Africa it holds about 85 per cent of the world's reserves and produced about 81 per cent of its platinum. A compact inside the Southern African Development Community, covering information-sharing, harmonised policy on the export of concentrate and a joint reserve, would widen the base of any floor. Zimbabwe is already moving that way: its national development strategy for 2026 to 2030 commits the government to restricting exports of platinum-group concentrate and to pushing producers to refine their matte further at home. Russia is left out deliberately: the 2013 talks showed that its interests diverge, its palladium makes it the dominant supplier of the metal South Africa does not dominate, and the Western sanctions that now reach parts of its metals trade would contaminate any arrangement it joined. Who acts: the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, with the Department of International Relations, through the Southern African Development Community. The seventh is Oppenheimer's lesson: make the demand. The producers already fund the World Platinum Investment Council, founded in 2014 to build investment demand for platinum. Its mandate should extend to the minor metals, to the certified South African ounce under the London responsible-sourcing guidance, and to a sovereign bar and coin programme in the country that minted the Krugerrand. A metal whose buyers see it only as an input will always be priced as one. De Beers understood that a century ago. Who acts: the producers' boards, which fund the Council and can change its mandate at its next budget; and the South African Mint, a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank, for the bar and coin programme. The eighth is a golden share in refining. When Washington approved the sale of US Steel in June 2025 it kept a golden share: a right to block specified decisions about a strategic asset without owning it. South Africa's precious-metals refineries are strategic in the same sense, and refining is already licensed under the Precious Metals Act. A negotiated golden share in each would give the state a veto over closing refining capacity, moving it abroad or selling it into foreign control, with no dividend and no say in marketing. It is the instrument most likely to be read as a step towards ownership the state should not want, which is why it stops at a veto. Who acts: the Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, with the South African Diamond and Precious Metals Regulator, which licenses every refinery. .The lawful toolkit, ordered from least to most contentious, with the office that would own each instrument and a realistic clock. Each rests on an existing legal power or a freely made contract; none requires producers to collude on price. A metal priced only as an input will stay an input. THE BEAR, MET X. What the sceptic rightly takes The bear's first objection is that this is a cartel by another name. Conceded in part. The consortium is the instrument closest to the line, which is why it is built last, confined to exports, confirmed by the Commission and designed to negotiate bands with buyers and withhold no metal from them. The other seven instruments involve no agreement between competitors at all: an exchange, a state buyer, a duty, contracts with customers, a treaty with a neighbour, a marketing programme and a veto over refining. The law distinguishes between these things even when the rhetoric does not. His second is substitution. Conceded, and it is the reason the programme aims at a floor and not a high price. Rhodium at nearly 30,000 dollars in 2021 taught its buyers to economise, and it is the lesson the programme is designed not to repeat. The case for pricing power is strongest in the short run and in the minor metals, where the metal is a trivial share of the product's cost; it weakens in the long run and in platinum, which recycling and Russia discipline. A policy that tries to extract more than the long-run elasticity allows will fail, as the tin agreement did. His third is retaliation. The relationship with Washington is strained, and in mid-September 2026 the United States announced visa restrictions on South African officials, which its ambassador called the first of a series of measures. But the record of 2026 shows which goods the United States will not tax. When it imposed a 12.5 per cent tariff on South African goods in July it spared, on the South African government's account, the platinum-group metals, and in January a proclamation under Section 232 found a national-security threat in imports of processed critical minerals and imposed no tariff on them, ordering negotiations instead; the report on those negotiations was due on 13 July 2026 and no outcome had been published by 15 October. The European Union has written a 65 per cent concentration benchmark into law. Conceded as a risk that remains, which is why the three least contentious instruments, the price venue, the reserve and the collars, come first, and why nothing proposed here restricts supply to any buyer. Each of the three offers the buyers something they say they want: transparent prices, stable supply and a floor that pays for responsible extraction. His fourth is the state. South Africa's record of running commercial enterprises does not inspire confidence that it could manage a metals reserve without political interference. Conceded without reservation. The reserve must be governed by published rules, run by an independent manager inside a ring-fenced company, audited and reported like a listed company, and barred from lending to anyone. If the state cannot accept those terms it should not build the reserve. State equity in strategic minerals is now orthodox in Washington; the live question is governance, and the answer is the one above. The absence of a capable manager is an argument for building one, not for leaving the price to others indefinitely. His fifth is that the producers do not want any of this, and that their shareholders, many of them abroad, are better served by the market as it is. Partly conceded. Listed producers are entitled to pursue their shareholders' interests. But the producers bore the full cost of the last collapse, and the price-venue, reserve and collar instruments reduce the volatility that their own boards cite whenever they close a shaft. The Richest Beggar on Earth · The Gold Papers, Paper 31 Part II Page 19 The bear takes the cartel, the spike and the naive state. He does not take the venue, the floor or the contract. THE RETURN TO GOLD XI. The same country, the same habit Everything this paper finds on the Bushveld has been true of the Witwatersrand for longer. The gold argument, run on the platinum belt, finds the same owner, the same venues, the same boardrooms and the same money, and the gold record adds two things platinum cannot yet show: where the habit leads, and the one occasion on which the country broke it. The price is set abroad. Every ounce of South African gold is sold against the LBMA Gold Price, set in London and administered since March 2015 by ICE Benchmark Administration. The JSE's gold futures are cash-settled in rand on the COMEX price, as its platinum futures are. Rand Refinery, which has refined roughly one ounce in three of all the gold ever produced, turns the metal into bars; London and New York price it. A country that mined about seventy per cent of the world's gold in 1970 never built a place to sell it at home, and it now mines about two and a half per cent. The gold producers, too, could deliver a share of output into a Johannesburg contract tomorrow, through a refinery they own between them; they have never once been asked to do it together. The response to the cycle is the same. Gold's deep shafts were declared uneconomic when the price touched 252.80 dollars in July 1999, and most were allowed to flood; platinum's were closed when the metal touched about 895 dollars in April 2025. Both industries still set their reserves on price decks that trail the market: gold reserves are declared at 1,934 to 2,915 dollars an ounce while the metal trades above 4,100. And both have lost their greatest builder. Anglo American sold out of its gold company in 2009, and that company took its primary listing to New York and its legal home to London in 2023; Anglo American sold the last of its platinum in September 2025. So are the owners of the owners. The fund managers who held no platinum shares at the bottom and applauded the payout at the top run the same retirement portfolios, under the same loosened Regulation 28, that hold South Africa's gold shares. The state that holds a fifth of two platinum producers through the Public Investment Corporation holds about 125 tonnes of gold at the Reserve Bank, a figure that has barely moved in twenty years, while the world's central banks bought 863 tonnes in 2025 and, on the World Gold Council's count of 6 October 2026, a further 170 tonnes in the first eight months of this year; the People's Bank of China then reported another 23 tonnes for September, its twenty-third month of buying in a row. The country will not hold the metal it mines, gold or platinum, and will not build the market in which either is priced. Once, it did. When the London Gold Pool collapsed in March 1968 and the central banks split the gold market in two, South Africa did not dump its new gold on the free market as Washington had hoped. It sold through Swiss banks and kept the free price near 40 dollars an ounce against an official price of 35. In December 1969 it secured an arrangement, ratified by the International Monetary Fund on 30 December, under which it would sell newly mined gold to the Fund at 35 dollars whenever the market fell to that level, and hold or sell freely above it. That was a floor, negotiated by the owner of most of the world's supply with the buyers' own institution, in the open and under international law. It is the closest precedent the country has for the programme in this paper, and it worked. The two metals now teach the same lesson from opposite ends. Gold has been re-rated by buyers who value it as money, and South Africa collects that windfall on a share too small to influence anything. Platinum is still priced as an industrial input, and South Africa's share is large enough to matter. The gold record shows what becomes of an owner that waits for the price: the share goes, and the chance goes with it. Apart from the two years after 1968, the first chance was never taken. Platinum is the chance still open. In 1969 the owner of most of the world's gold negotiated a floor with the buyers' own institution. It is the precedent for everything in this paper. THE VERDICT XII. Name the price of security Rhodes, Barnato and Oppenheimer understood something their successors have forgotten: the value of a scarce thing depends on who sells it, where and on what terms. They took a gemstone valued mainly for what it signified and, by controlling supply, holding stock and making demand, priced it for most of a century. South Africa today holds almost as large a share of the world's platinum-group reserves as De Beers controlled of diamond production at its height, in metals the rich world has declared in statute that it cannot do without, and it takes the price that traders in New York, London and Guangzhou give it. Copying De Beers is neither possible nor desirable: its single channel would be illegal today, and the law that ended it is right to forbid private collusion. What remains is to do lawfully what the buyers already do for themselves: discover the price at home, hold stock against the cycle, tax unrefined exports where foreign demand cannot move, sign collars with the governments that have declared these metals critical, align with the neighbour that shares the reef, build the demand and keep a veto over refining. Every one of those instruments exists in law or in contract today. None of them has been used. The metal is not in doubt. What is in doubt is why a country that owns most of it has never asked to be paid for owning it. The rich world has spent the last two years writing floors, reserves, equity stakes and reference prices into its own policy for the minerals it lacks, and in July 2026, on the South African government's account, it exempted South Africa's platinum-group metals from its new tariff. The richest beggar on earth should stop taking the price it is shown and name its price for supplying them. .SOUTH AFRICA HOLDS EIGHTY-THREE PER CENT OF THE WORLD'S PLATINUM-GROUP RESERVES AND MORE THAN EIGHT OUNCES IN TEN OF ITS NEW RHODIUM. IT DOES NOT SET THE PRICE OF EITHER. PRICE-FIXING IS FORBIDDEN TO COMPANIES. A PRICE VENUE, A SOVEREIGN RESERVE, AN EXPORT DUTY AND A COLLAR SIGNED WITH THE BUYERS ARE NOT, AND THE BUYERS ALREADY USE THEM. THE RICHEST BEGGAR ON EARTH SHOULD NAME ITS PRICE. .*Dr Duarte F da Silva • Capital Markets Strategist • Managing Director, Northbound Processing • Germiston, October 2026 .A NOTE ON THE FIGURES Figures checked against sources, 23–26 September 2026, and every figure re-checked on 26 September 2026. The paper was checked again on 8 October 2026, when prices were moved to 7 October 2026 and the corrections listed in the library index were made, and on 10 October 2026, when prices were moved to the 9 October close, the buyers' measures in Section VI were set out in a table, China's platinum imports were brought to the August customs data and central-bank gold buying to the World Gold Council's release of 6 October 2026. It was checked again on 13 October 2026, when prices were moved to the 12 October close and three reports were added: the European Commission's second list of strategic projects of 9 October, PwC's SA Mine 2026 of 6 October and China's September gold purchase, reported on 7 October. It was checked a last time on 16 October 2026, when prices were moved to the 15 October close, Statistics South Africa's August production figures and the Treasury's royalty receipts were added to Section I, and Valterra's remarks of 15 October on Mogalakwena to Section VIII. Reserves and production: PGM reserves 76,000 t world, South Africa 63,000 t (82.9%), Zimbabwe 1,300 t, Russia 11,000 t; 2025 mine production platinum 170 t world, South Africa 120 t (70.6%), Zimbabwe 18 t; palladium Russia 84 t, South Africa 70 t, world 190 t (US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026). Supply shares 2025: platinum primary 5,557 koz, South Africa 3,957 koz (71%), Russia 650 koz (12%), recycling 1,547 of 7,104 koz total (22%); rhodium primary 701 koz, South Africa 566 koz (81%), Russia 68 koz (10%), recycling 312 of 1,013 koz (31%); palladium recycling 3,135 of 9,724 koz (32%); ruthenium primary 972 koz, South Africa “over 85%”; iridium primary 229 koz (Johnson Matthey, PGM Market Report, 14 May 2026). Gold 2025: South Africa ~90 t of world mine production 3,671.6 t (World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025); about 70% of world gold at the 1970 peak (LBMA). Critical-mineral status: US Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals (Federal Register, 7 November 2025) includes platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium; Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 (Critical Raw Materials Act), in force 23 May 2024, lists PGMs as strategic and critical and sets the 2030 65% single-third-country benchmark; European Commission, 9 October 2026 (IP/26/2113): 46 new Strategic Projects, all in 16 member states, making 106 with the 47 Union and 13 third-country projects selected in 2025, and Commissioner Séjourné's words. Price venues: LBMA Platinum and Palladium Prices administered by ICE Benchmark Administration from 1 July 2026 (LBMA; ICE, 7 July 2026), previously the LME from December 2014; GFEX platinum and palladium futures and options launched 27 November 2025, China “a price taker” (WPIC), open to foreign investors from 28 September 2026 (Mining Weekly, 25 September 2026); JSE platinum futures cash-settled in rand on the US price (JSE); Johnson Matthey base prices for Hong Kong, London and New York. Prices: platinum US$1,621.50 (NYMEX; Trading Economics, 15 October 2026 close; US$1,619 on 14 October, the lowest since August 2026), palladium US$1,114 (Kitco, 15 October 2026) and rhodium US$8,500 bid (Kitco, 15 October 2026; dealer-to-dealer quotation), iridium US$8,850 and ruthenium US$1,900 (Umicore 10am prices, 15 October 2026); gold US$4,171.06 (Trading Economics close, 15 October 2026); on 12 October the figures were platinum US$1,693.50 and gold US$4,171.88; platinum ~US$895 (April 2025) and record US$2,923.70 on NYMEX, 26 January 2026; rhodium “nearly $30,000” in March 2021 and the consumer-flexibility quote (Johnson Matthey, PGM Market Report, May 2021); rhodium below US$5,000 by late 2024 (trade sources). Royalties R16bn in 2024 (−37%) and mining taxes R43.6bn (−49%), both estimates (Minerals Council, reported by Daily Maverick, 3 February 2025). PwC, SA Mine 2026 (6 October 2026): revenue of the PGM companies analysed R429bn, +59%; average dollar platinum price +80%, July 2025 to June 2026 against the twelve months before; PGM output below 2019 (Miningmx and Mining Weekly, 6 October 2026); National Treasury royalty receipts R9.7bn for April–August 2026 against R3.0bn a year earlier (News24, 6 October 2026, on the PwC review); Statistics South Africa, Mining: Production and Sales, August 2026 (13 October 2026): production −12.7% y/y, PGMs −6.1%, July revised to −7.0%. De Beers: formed 12 March 1888; Kimberley Central cheque of £5,338,650, 18 July 1889; Oppenheimer chairman 1929, Diamond Corporation 1930, CSO 1934; “A Diamond Is Forever”, Frances Gerety, N.W. Ayer, 1947; DOJ suit 1945; guilty plea and US$10m fine, 13 July 2004 (US Department of Justice); US$295m class settlement, approved 2008, effective 2012 after appeals; European Commission commitments decision on Alrosa, 22 February 2006, upheld by the Court of Justice 29 June 2010 (C-441/07 P); Supplier of Choice, 2000; market share ~63% (2000) and ~25% (2021) on published estimates; Spar, The Cooperative Edge (Cornell, 1994); Bergenstock and Maskulka, Business Horizons 44(3), 2001. JCI founded by Barnato 1889; Rustenburg Platinum managed by JCI from 1930; platinum interests to Anglo American Platinum in the 1995 restructuring; Valterra demerged 31 May 2025; Anglo sold its remaining 19.9% on 4 September 2025 (Anglo American). Botswana–De Beers sales agreement and licences, signed 25 February 2025: ODC 30% (years 1–5), 40% (6–10), 50% if extended; licences to 2054. 2013 talks: Durban BRICS summit, March 2013 (Bloomberg, 26 March 2013; RT, 27 March 2013, for the “influence the markets” quotation); Miningmx, 18 June 2013, for the divergence and the Peter Davey quotation. Beneficiation Strategy, June 2011 (five value chains: energy commodities, iron and steel, pigment and titanium metal, autocatalysts and diesel particulate filters, jewellery); Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy, 20 May 2025 (DMPR). Economics: Hotelling, JPE 39(2):137–175, 1931 (quotation p.138); Solow, AER 64(2):1–14, 1974 (the “conservationist's friend” summary is the literature's, not a quotation); Stiglitz, AER 66(4):655–661, 1976; Lerner, RES 1(3):157–175, 1934; Johnson, RES 21(2):142–153, 1953; Coase, JLE 15(1):143–149, 1972; Gilbert, Bell Journal 9(2):385–395, 1978; Stigler, JPE 72(1):44–61, 1964; Keynes, “The International Control of Raw Materials”, J. International Economics 4(3):299–315, 1974 (memorandum of 1942); Pindyck, REStat 60(2):238–251, 1978; Alhajji and Huettner, Energy Journal 21(3):31–60, 2000; Romani, Comincioli and Vergalli, MIT CEEPR WP 2024-18; Shojaeddini et al., Mineral Economics 38(4), 2025 (short-run elasticities −0.03 to −0.51); long-run platinum elasticity −1.15 (TIAX 2004, in Dahl, MEDS, Colorado School of Mines WP 2020-02); Prest, IDS Bulletin 17(4), 1986 (tin, 24 October 1985, ~£900m); Baffes, World Bank, 29 June 2020 (coffee, July 1989, ~40%). Law: Competition Act 89 of 1998, ss 4(1)(b), 10(3)(b), 59, 73A (in force 1 May 2016); Block Exemption for the Promotion of Exports, GG 53822, 12 December 2025 (Government Notice R6930; item 3.9 on joint negotiation with overseas buyers; exclusions and the confirmation procedure from the regulation's text); Webb-Pomerene Act, 15 USC §62; IAM v. OPEC, 649 F.2d 1354 (9th Cir. 1981); NOPEC, never enacted (latest S.678/H.R.3081, 118th Congress); Animal Science Products v. Hebei Welcome Pharmaceutical, 585 U.S. (14 June 2018), and the Second Circuit's comity ruling of August 2021; Ahlström (Wood Pulp), 27 September 1988; Intel, C-413/14 P, 6 September 2017; GATT Arts XI:1, XX(g), XXI; China — Raw Materials, AB 30 January 2012; China — Rare Earths, AB 7 August 2014; Indonesia — Raw Materials (DS592), panel 30 November 2022, appealed December 2022; Indonesia 2.6 of 3.9 Mt world nickel (USGS MCS 2026); EU–SADC EPA Art. 26; Diamond Export Levy Act 15 of 2007; Precious Metals Act 37 of 2005; MPRDA s26; Mineral and Petroleum Resources Royalty Act 28 of 2008; chrome export controls approved in principle by Cabinet, 1 July 2025 (OPIS), and the industrial strategy of June 2026 (Miningmx, 9 June 2026). Buyers: MP Materials–Department of Defense agreement, 10 July 2025 (MP Materials); Critical Minerals Ministerial, 4 February 2026 (CSIS); USTR request for comments, 26 February 2026 (Federal Register); G7 Critical Minerals Action Plan, 17 June 2025; EU–SA Clean Trade and Investment Partnership, 20 November 2025 (European Commission). ESG: Kwezi, 1,114 jobs (Mining Weekly, 8 September 2026); Farlam Commission report, 25 June 2015; LPPM Responsible Platinum and Palladium Guidance, July 2018, in force from 1 January 2019; Royal Bafokeng royalty converted into Impala shares, 2006–07 (Moneyweb, which gives the rate as 22.5% of taxable income; the rate was not confirmed against a primary source); Sovereign wealth fund: first proposed by the President in August 2018; 'not the most opportune and favourable time' (President Ramaphosa, August 2024, Mail & Guardian, 29 August 2024); DBSA feasibility study (Sunday Times/TimesLIVE, 5 September 2026); South Africa has no sovereign wealth fund. IDC among Impala's founding shareholders with Union Corporation, production from July 1969 (Implats history). Scrap-metal export duty under Schedule 1 Part 6 of the Customs and Excise Act from 1 August 2021 (SARS; GG 44905, 28 July 2021). JSE platinum futures cash-settled in rand on the NYMEX/COMEX price (JSE product page); ~280 JSE listings, ~500 delistings 1989–2024, six new listings in 2025 (Financial Mail, 23 April 2026). Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy (DMPR, May 2025): 'opportunities for market influence', no lead institution named for platinum-group metals. Zondo Commission, state capture report, 29 April 2022 (TimesLIVE), on the 2015 appointment of the minister of mineral resources; Madlanga Commission public hearings from 17 September 2025 (Sowetan, 19 September 2026), final report due 25 January 2027. Johnson Matthey–Rustenburg relationship since 1931 (Platinum Metals Review 40(1), 1996); Anglo American Platinum's ~US$100m in 2011 discounts and commissions and non-renewal in 2013 (Miningmx, 17 October 2014); Valterra Platinum Marketing Limited, company no. 06726161, incorporated 16 October 2008 as Anglo Platinum Marketing Limited, renamed 28 May 2025 (Companies House); WPIC head office, 166 Piccadilly, London (WPIC). PIC holdings: Sibanye-Stillwater 20.42% (Mining Weekly, 10 October 2025); Northam ~20.47% (Mining Weekly, 22 July 2026). Impala FY2026 R17.1bn returned; Valterra H1 2026 interim dividend R15bn (company results). South Africa + Zimbabwe: 64,300 of 76,000 t reserves (85%) and 138 of 170 t platinum (81%) are the author's arithmetic on USGS figures. A citable primary source for the historic South African platinum producer price was sought (Bureau of Mines Minerals Yearbooks of the 1970s and 1980s; Platinum Metals Review 40(1), 1996) and not obtained; the producer-price era is therefore not relied on. Hunt silver: London fix US$49.45 on 18 January 1980; COMEX rule changes, January 1980 (CFTC testimony, 25 March 2010; SEC report, October 1982); Federal Reserve credit restraint, 14 March 1980 (Schreft, Richmond Fed Economic Review, 1990); US$10.80 on 27 March 1980; Minpeco v. Hunt, 718 F.Supp. 168 (verdict 20 August 1988); Chapter 11 filings, September 1988. LME nickel: suspension and cancellation of trades, 8 March 2022 (FCA final notice, 20 March 2025); judicial review dismissed, [2023] EWHC 2969 (Admin), 29 November 2023; appeal dismissed, [2024] EWCA Civ 1168, 7 October 2024. US state equity: US Steel golden share, June 2025; Intel ~9.9% for ~US$8.9bn of grants, August 2025; Lithium Americas and Trilogy Metals stakes, October 2025; Vulcan Elements equity, November 2025 (NIST); Project Vault, EXIM loan of up to US$10bn approved 2 February 2026 (EXIM; the minerals covered are not published); 42 deals, US$28.4bn at 30 July 2026 (Council on Foreign Relations tracker). Tariffs: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, No. 24-1287, 20 February 2026; Section 122 tariffs expired 23 July 2026; Section 301 action, 91 FR 47318 (28 July 2026, document 2026-15181), effective 24 July 2026, South Africa at 12.5%; exemptions including “critical minerals, platinum-group and precious metals” as stated by Minister Tau (SAnews, 27 July 2026; Polity, 24 July 2026); Section 232 proclamation on processed critical minerals (Proclamation 11001, 14 January 2026), no tariff; AmCham South Africa reported no carve-out and the annex could not be inspected, so the exemption is attributed to the government; no change to the rate or the exemption was found at 16 October 2026. US visa restrictions on South African officials, 16 September 2026 (Semafor). Semafor, 21 September 2026 (PGMs more than a third of South African exports to the US; Kaamil Alli quotation). Section 232 processed critical minerals: proclamation of 14 January 2026, Commerce and USTR update on the negotiations due within 180 days, by 13 July 2026 (Federal Register, 20 January 2026, document 2026-01045; Covington, April 2026), no outcome found at 16 October 2026. World Gold Council, Central Bank Gold Statistics, 6 October 2026 (August net purchases 39 t; 170 t reported January–August 2026). People's Bank of China gold holdings 77.47 Moz at the end of September 2026 against 76.73 Moz a month earlier, about 23 t, the twenty-third consecutive monthly increase (Reuters, 7 October 2026). Palladium from Russia: USITC negative determination, 29 May 2026; Sibanye-Stillwater appeal to the CIT, 16 July 2026 (Mining Weekly). China: zero-tariff treatment for 53 African countries from 1 May 2026 (State Council Customs Tariff Commission, 28 April 2026; gov.cn, 1 May 2026); platinum imports H1 2026 48.18 t (+17.8%), South Africa the top supplier (SMM, 23 July 2026, customs data); August 2026 platinum imports 8.11 t (+11.55% y/y, −2.87% m/m) and palladium 3.35 t (+73.58% y/y) (SMM, China customs data, September 2026; still the latest published at 16 October 2026); MOFCOM export-control announcements of 9 October 2025, suspended after the Busan meeting of 30 October 2025, the suspension running to 10 November 2026; on 28 September 2026 the Ministry of Commerce said its trade arrangements with the United States had been extended to 10 January 2027, without naming the rare-earth controls (rawmaterials.net, 28 September 2026). Russian palladium: shipments limited in H1 1997 and delayed in 2000; London fix record US$1,094 on 26 January 2001 (USGS Minerals Yearbooks 1997, 2000, 2001; USGS Open-File Report 2004-1224); Russian state stock sales 1,000,000 oz in 2010 (Johnson Matthey, Platinum 2011 Interim Review). Impala Platinum revenue and group unit cost per 6E oz (rand): FY2020 24,863/13,345; FY2021 39,478/14,840; FY2022 37,703/17,364; FY2023 36,118/19,834; FY2024 25,257/20,922; FY2025 25,172/22,491; FY2026 38,116/24,249 (Implats annual results, FY2021–FY2026); the buy and sell band is the author's illustration. Structure: Paper 31 Part II; it stands alone and relies on no other paper. The proposals, their ordering and the characterisation of price floors as price-setting are the author's own. Leadership and investors: Craig Miller, 2026 PGM Industry Day, Johannesburg (IOL Business Report, 20 March 2026); Miller on Mogalakwena, the Sandsloot underground project and “the supply is not a concern” (Bloomberg, carried by Mining Weekly, 15 October 2026: trial mining later in 2026, final investment decision expected in 2027); PGM dividends R44.5bn for the year to June 2026: Implats R17.1bn, Valterra R15.1bn, Northam R6.8bn, Sibanye-Stillwater R5.7bn; Valterra 70% of headline earnings (Business Day, 4 September 2026); JSE 2025 results, 2 March 2026 (operating income R3.5bn, commodity derivatives trading R94m, +5.5%, payout 85.6% incl. 100c special dividend); Regulation 28 'a very positive development' (Old Mutual Corporate Consultants, 15 December 2022); Old Mutual R9bn offshore-mandate outflow risk (Business Day, 30 September 2024); 'Coronation: Why we don't hold PGM shares in our portfolios' (Moneyweb, 26 October 2023); Anglo American's platinum exit announced 14 May 2024 amid shareholder pressure and BHP's approach (Bloomberg). Gold: LBMA Gold Price administered by ICE Benchmark Administration from 20 March 2015 (LBMA); JSE gold futures cash-settled in rand on the COMEX price (JSE); about a third of all gold ever mined refined by Rand Refinery (Rand Refinery); South Africa about 70% of world gold in 1970 (LBMA) and ~90 t of 3,671.6 t in 2025 (WGC); US$252.80 on 20 July 1999 (LBMA); sector gold reserve prices US$1,934–2,915/oz in the 2025 reserve statements (company filings); AngloGold Ashanti NYSE primary listing and UK domicile, 25 September 2023; SARB gold ~125 t (SARB; WGC); central-bank purchases 863 t in 2025 (WGC, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025). 1968–69: two-tier gold market from March 1968; South African sales through Swiss banks and free price ~US$40 (Time, 25 July 1969); US–South Africa understanding of December 1969, IMF decision of 30 December 1969, sales of newly mined gold to the IMF at US$35 when the market price was at or below US$35 (Foreign Relations of the United States 1969–1976, vol. III, document 145). De Beers' share of world diamond production ~90% at its height (1902; 1980s), ~63% in 2000 and ~25% in 2021 (published estimates). Stillwater and East Boulder mines (Sibanye-Stillwater). Anglo American's sale of its remaining AngloGold Ashanti shares, 2009. Indonesia: nickel ore export ban 2014, relaxed 2017, reimposed 1 January 2020; two smelters before the 2014 ban (CSIS). Mineral Economics study covers 74 non-fuel mineral commodities (USGS). Delivery-commitment arithmetic: a fifth of South Africa's 120 t of platinum in 2025 (USGS: 138 t with Zimbabwe, less Zimbabwe's 18 t) is 24 t ≈ 772,000 oz ≈ US$1.25bn at the 15 October 2026 close of US$1,622 (US$1.31bn at the 12 October close of US$1,694); the author's. PIC holdings: 20.42% of Sibanye-Stillwater (October 2025) and ~20.5% of Northam (July 2026), as above. Ghana GoldBod buys 30% of large-mine output under an agreement with the mining companies, from July 2026; Zimbabwe's National Development Strategy 2, 2026–2030, on restricting PGM concentrate exports and further processing of matte (The Herald, 15 January 2026); the 1969 IMF arrangement as cited above. Northbound Processing • Germiston, October 2026. The Gold Papers — Paper 31, Part II. This paper does not constitute investment or legal advice. It proposes public-policy instruments and does not advocate any agreement between competitors that South African or foreign competition law prohibits; any collective arrangement described would require confirmation by the Competition Commission and consideration of foreign law. The author runs a business in the metals-recovery economy.

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