Honorary Vice President of IMANI-Africa, Bright Simons, says the Minerals Income and Investment Fund (MIIF) should be measured in its enthusiasm about its role in the lithium deal.

According to him, the MIIF has been on a self-congratulatory spree concerning what the fund describes as significant capital gains on their proposed investment in the lithium deal.

He said such high enthusiasm towards the proposed investment in the lithium deal is problematic and brings to question what analysis has been made in regards to the price trend of lithium.

Explaining his point on JoyNews’ Newsfile on Saturday, Bright Simons said, “For instance they make the argument that they’ve already started to make significant capital gains appreciation on the investment they’ve promised to make and it’s not clear yet whether they’ve already signed the documents and therefore they own this six percent contributing interest in Ewoyaa and the three percent in the holding company.

“But they’re now saying that because at some point in time the price moved from 26 cents to 34 cents they’ve already made money. That’s not how you do this analysis. You’d have to take into account the price over a longer period of time to see whether or not these are trends you can bank on because already that share price has dropped to 27 cents so the 26 to 34 is no longer even valid, already the price has dropped.”

He noted that just as the price of lithium has experienced significant drops in the last few months, so has the share price of Atlantic Lithium, the parent company of Barari DV, also experienced significant drop.

This he said could potentially affect Ghana’s investment into the company in the foreseeable future should the trend continue.

“And as the price of the raw material keeps dropping the share price of Atlantic Lithium will also keep dropping at some point so it’s not clear why they do that. Already this is a company that has lost half of its market value since it was established. It moved from about 342 million dollars to about 168 million dollars, so if you’re investing in it you don’t become so self-congratulatory.

“I’m not saying that there’s a problem with the investment, I’m just saying that it’s too early to be prematurely celebrating,” he said.

He added that “It could well be that this is a great coup because of what we are all aware of about the transition so lithium is going to be big. If lithium is big, Atlantic Lithium is going to be big. But my argument is that we have not seen that yet.

“So to already say that you have already seen massive appreciation I think is just propagandist and for a sovereign wealth fund you should be extremely conservative.”