Special report · September 2026
Why a ten-billion-dollar claim can be argued
The public ICSID case summary and AVZ financial reports reviewed here describe relief as title plus an exploitation permit, with later motions for penalties. They do not publish a filed quantum of “US$10 billion”. The figure is a claimant-side valuation thesis, not a tribunal finding.
| Building block | Published number | Path toward US$10 billion |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 DFS post-tax NPV at 10 per cent, 100 per cent basis | US$1.028 billion | Too low alone. Uses conservative 2020 lithium prices and a twenty-year reserve, not the full resource or the 2022 price spike. |
| Same study, pre-tax NPV / life-of-mine EBITDA / NPAT | US$2.35bn / US$8.36bn / US$3.78bn | Shows cash generation far above NPV. Expropriation pleadings sometimes use undiscounted or lightly discounted cash flows plus interest. |
| Resource versus reserve | ~401 Mt @ 1.65% Li2O | The DFS mine plan used only part of the body. A 29-year or full-district model multiplies value. |
| Peak listed equity | ~A$2.7 billion (May 2022 halt) | The market already priced a multi-billion asset before the January 2023 decrees. Lost market value is a floor, not a ceiling. |
| 2022 SC6 price spike versus DFS price | Spot many times DFS assumptions | A but-for model using 2022–23 realised prices on even a few missed years of 700,000 tonnes can add several billion of revenue before cost. |
| Delay | First AVZ production aimed late 2023; still not AVZ’s mine in 2026 | Three-plus lost operating years, a higher-capex world, and interest on an expropriation claim. |
| Strategic premium | Zijin build ~US$1.0–1.4bn; KoBold / US interest | Control of one of the largest hard-rock lithium districts is worth more than a single DFS pit to states and battery makers. |
A defensible public range from documents alone is roughly US$1 to 4 billion on a classic discounted-cash-flow of the DFS pit at mid-cycle prices. A band of US$5 to 10 billion and above is available only if a tribunal accepts the whole district rather than the twenty-year reserve, high-price years that were missed, compound interest, and a finding that the state’s conduct was expropriatory rather than a lawful mining-code forfeiture. The only hard number already written down is €39.1 million against Cominière — a penalty for disobeying orders, not the value of the mine.