Business tie-up for Pagan worries watchdog group

While endorsing a new potential investor seeking to mine Pagan pozzolan, PaganWatch has raised concerns about the company’s association with an old mining permit holder, JG Sablan.

PaganWatch spokesperson Pete Perez said that Bridgecreek International Corp. is credible as a potential investor in that it is an established company with verifiable financial assets.

According to Bridgecreek’s website, the Los Angeles-based company is in the real estate business. To date, the company reportedly has over $400 million or 2 million square feet of retail, condo, and apartment space. The group also owns and manages more than 1.5 million square feet of space in Southern California. It is also expanding into China.

Bridgecreek and JG Sablan, it was learned, have entered into a joint-venture agreement to extract pozzolan from Pagan.

Bridgecreek chairman Frank Jao, who attended Gov. Benigno R. Fitial’s inauguration earlier this month, and Bridgrecreek chief executive officer John Carlson will return to Saipan in the next 10 days to officially open an office with JG Sablan.

For PaganWatch, this agreement is a weakness for Bridgecreek.

“Since Bridgecreek has no experience in the mining business, they will need to find an operator and JG Sablan’s history of worse than non-performance makes the company completely unacceptable,” Perez said in an email interview with the Saipan Tribune.

The Marianas Public Lands Authority issued a pozzolan commercial mining permit on Sept. 8, 2005. For more than 10 years that the permit has been in effect, JG Sablan has failed to get a viable mining operation going on in Pagan.

Perez, who met with Bridgecreek officials in December 2005, expressed concern that the company is viewing JG Sablan’s permit “as a means of securing Pagan’s pozzolan at the low $2.50 per metric ton price set by the permit.”

“Clearly, a fixed price is not in the CNMI’s best interest since pozzolan prices vary with demand and concrete demand is on the rise worldwide,” he added.

He also said that Bridgecreek may have been led to believe that by using an old permit, they will be able to avoid environmental and other regulatory requirements.

“But it’s early yet, and hopefully Bridgecreek will recognize that trying to take short cuts will actually lead to a much longer path. Their best strategy for success would be to dissociate themselves from JG Sablan and get their own permit directly from the CNMI in a straightforward manner, free of legal entanglements, and with the full backing and support of all the regulatory agencies and other stakeholders who would be the task force participants and can clear the way and speed the permitting process for them,” Perez said.