Otago Daily Times
· 6 April 2026 · Ruairi O'Shea
“New anti-mine group takes aim at tailings dam failure risk”
About
A small miner against a local paper. The paper corrected one point: the expert it quoted is not a professor. New Zealand's Media Council did not uphold the rest of the complaint. Article and ruling read in full; the reply the paper printed sits behind a paywall.
How it ended, sentence by sentence
The outlet
3
3 unanswered
The accused
2
- 3 still standing: unanswered, or the outlet was right
- 2 answered, refuted with a document, or claimed without proof
Article score: 6.0/10
Every sentence starts counting for the article, because unanswered is how it was published. Answering it takes the point off the outlet and gives it to the person named. Green means answered, not proven: what an editor has checked against a document is written in each sentence's own label.
What the outlet published
What the other side says
What the outlet published · Sentence 1
“The group's website posits the mine's purported economic benefit — an estimated $6.75 billion worth of gold, 375 new jobs and $1.5b in tax income — did not outweigh the economic cost of a likely environmental disaster, with $1.9b at stake for the tourism and agricultural industries.”
What this claims, in our words · ES
El grupo sostiene que el beneficio económico de la mina no compensa el coste de un desastre ambiental probable.
What the other side says
no reply yet
Are you Santana Minerals Ltd? Reply here →What the outlet published · Sentence 2
“Around 78% of the value of the gold will go to an Australian mining company, but we take on the majority of the risk.”
What this claims, in our words · ES
Alrededor del 78% del valor del oro iría a una minera australiana mientras el riesgo se queda en Nueva Zelanda.
What the other side says
«Santana also complains that the claim that "Around 78% of the value of the gold will go to an Australian mining company" is presented as a direct quote and left to stand without challenge, qualification, or attribution to any identified source. It contradicts Santana's own calculations that suggests over 60% of gross profits are expected to remain in New Zealand.»
Santana Minerals' complaint, recorded in the New Zealand Media Council ruling, case 3883, 8 June 2026. https://www.mediacouncil.org.nz/rulings/santana-minerals-against-the-otago-daily-times/ EDITOR'S NOTE: the Media Council did not uphold this point — "Santana has not demonstrated that the figure is clearly inaccurate".
What the outlet published · Sentence 3
“The group said the dam — used to store byproducts from the Santana project — would contain 18 million cu m of toxic waste behind a wall of waste rock taller than the Clyde Dam, forever.”
What this claims, in our words · ES
La balsa de residuos contendría 18 millones de metros cúbicos de residuo tóxico tras un muro más alto que la presa de Clyde, para siempre.
What the other side says
no reply yet
Are you Santana Minerals Ltd? Reply here →What the outlet published · Sentence 4
“Over the past century, just over one in 100 tailings dams have failed (compared to one in 10,000 with conventional water retention dams) and when they did, the results were disastrous.”
What this claims, in our words · ES
En el último siglo ha fallado algo más de una de cada cien balsas de residuos, frente a una de cada diez mil presas convencionales.
What the other side says
no reply yet
Are you Santana Minerals Ltd? Reply here →What the outlet published · Sentence 5
“...while pointing to the work of tailings dam expert Steven Vick, who said the eventual failure rate was 100%.”
What this claims, in our words · ES
El artículo citó a un experto en balsas mineras, presentado como catedrático, que situaba la tasa de fallo final en el 100%.
What the other side says
«Santana also complains that it was inaccurate to refer to the expert mentioned in the article as "Prof Steven Vick" as he is not a professor. He is a geotechnical engineer and consultant with no university affiliation. The incorrect title inflated the apparent authority of the claim and misdirected readers.» «[T]he claims appear to have come from a research paper by Mr Vick in which he said that the structural failure probability of tailings dams "approaches 1.0 after several hundred years" [when constructed using 20th-century technology].»
Santana Minerals' complaint, Media Council ruling, 8 June 2026. EDITOR'S NOTE: on this point the paper corrected itself. The Otago Daily Times accepted the error and the page no longer says "Prof". The Council added that the correction should have been flagged on the article itself.
What happened, in order
Every date on this page, in one list. Nothing here is new; it is the same record, in sequence.
Otago Daily Times publishes the article.
Santana Minerals Ltd replies to 2 sentences (2, 5).
Case opened here with 5 sentences quoted. Santana Minerals Ltd can reply to each one.
Published unedited and sealed with a timestamp. A reply can be corrected later; every earlier version stays public.
Share this case
Sharing sends the sentence, not our opinion of it: whoever opens it reads both columns.