In the far northwest of Ghana, near the border with Burkina Faso, sits one of West Africa's most promising undeveloped gold deposits. It has never poured a single ounce commercially. Yet the Black Volta Gold Project has become the centre of a cross-continental legal fight, one that now runs through an international arbitration tribunal in London, the High Court of England and Wales, and the Ghanaian government. Here is what JoyNews Research knows about the dispute so far, what each side's claims are, and where the matter stands. The question of who is ultimately right is one the courts have yet to finally answer.

Our note on names

Names matter enormously in this explainer, as they are easily muddled. The gold concessions themselves are held by Ghanaian operating companies, principally Azumah Resources Ghana Ltd, together with its affiliates Upwest Resources Ltd and Phoenix Resources Ltd. Sitting above them offshore are the holding and investor entities: the Australian parent, Azumah Resources Pty Ltd (referred to here as Azumah Australia), and two special-purpose vehicles, IGIC Pte Ltd of Singapore and Cangol Pte Ltd, all connected to the private equity fund Ibaera Capital.

The critical complication is that since late 2025 the name Azumah Resources Ghana Ltd has been used by a board that Engineers & Planners says it controls, while the offshore investor entities, Azumah Australia, IGIC and Cangol, reject that control and continue to assert ownership. In other words, Azumah Resources Ghana Ltd on one hand, and Azumah Australia, IGIC and Cangol on the other, now sit on opposite sides of the fight, even though both trade under the Azumah name. The JoyNews Research analysis names the specific entity wherever it matters. The claimants in the English court order, for reference, are IGIC, Cangol and Azumah Resources Pty Ltd, all on the investor side.

The asset at the heart of it

The project sits on the Wa-Lawra gold belt in Ghana's Upper West Region, an area first identified as prospective decades ago but repeatedly passed over because of the cost and risk of proving up a mine there. Azumah Resources Ghana acquired prospecting licences in the belt in 2006, and the mining concessions tied to Black Volta were granted in 2014.

Turning that ground into something bankable took years of expensive drilling. By 2012, roughly 400,000 to 600,000 ounces had been confirmed. After the private equity fund Ibaera Capital entered in 2017 and committed further capital, a definitive feasibility study eventually supported a reserve on the order of 1.3 million ounces and a projected mine life of about eleven years, with average annual production of roughly 163,000 ounces in the first five years. Ghana, for context, currently produces 6 million ounces of gold, so a mine of this size would represent a meaningful, though not enormous, slice of national output.

Ownership of the Azumah group evolved over time. Ibaera Capital, a fund led by Australian and American mining veterans, first took a stake of around 42.5 to 47.5 per cent in the Azumah structure in 2017 in exchange for an injection of about $13.5 million, and then, through its IGIC vehicle, moved to full ownership in 2020 with a further commitment reported at around $40 million.

James Wallbank, Ibaera's managing partner, has served as chairman of Azumah Resources Ghana and has become the most visible spokesman for the international investors. This group today insists it remains the rightful owner of the project.

Enter Engineers & Planners

Engineers & Planners is one of Ghana's largest indigenous mining-services and construction firms. It was founded and is run by Ibrahim Mahama. E&P has consistently maintained that its involvement in Black Volta is a purely commercial transaction.

The two sides agree that a 2023 agreement was signed between the Azumah investor entities, meaning IGIC, Cangol and the Azumah companies, and E&P, and they agree on the headline number of $100 million. They agree on very little else. According to accounts attributed to E&P, the Azumah shareholders approached the firm offering it the right to acquire the project for $100 million, a figure E&P says it accepted even though the asset was then valued at less than $80 million.

E&P has said the payment was to be made in two instalments and that it took an active role in funding the mine's operations from late 2023, at a reported rate of around $500,000 a month, while also renegotiating debts the project owed to Ghanaian authorities. In E&P's telling, the relationship soured when a director on the investor side sought to raise the price dramatically, to $300 million, as gold prices climbed. E&P says it rejected that demand, after which the investors moved to terminate the deal, prompting E&P to commence arbitration.

The Ibaera-aligned investors tell a fundamentally different story. They say any right for E&P to acquire the mine was conditional on obligations the firm never fulfilled, that they never sold the project or authorised any transfer of ownership, and that they terminated the development agreement in December 2024 because, in their account, E&P failed to raise the promised financing and carry out contracted site works.

More seriously, the investors have accused E&P of seizing the mine site and forging signatures to push through a share transfer. E&P has denied those allegations in full. Because the two accounts cannot both be true, the underlying facts are exactly what the arbitration exists to determine, and until it delivers a final ruling, neither version can be treated as settled.

The arbitration and its London seat

The contracts underpinning the deal were written under English law, which designated the United Kingdom as the venue for resolving any dispute. That is why a quarrel between two companies operating in Ghana is being fought out in London. E&P commenced arbitration before the International Chamber of Commerce on 21 October 2024, alleging that the Azumah companies and their shareholders had breached the development agreement.

The Azumah investor side filed a counterclaim the following month, denying the allegations and levelling its own. The tribunal is seated in London and, according to Ghanaian legal reporting, is chaired by the Nigerian senior advocate Funke Adekoya SAN, sitting alongside Shadrack Arhin and Edwin Glasgow KC, the same panel named in the English court order that later surfaced.

The tribunal issued an interim award dated 19 September 2025 that has itself become contested territory. In that award, the tribunal declined, at that stage, to grant relief that would reverse or unwind various corporate decisions. These included purported appointments or removals of directors, purported changes to the shareholding of the Azumah group companies (Azumah Resources Ghana and Upwest), and the cancellation of purported notices of board meetings.

The tribunal expressly stated that it would revisit those matters at a later stage of the arbitration. The precise wording matters, because both sides have characterised it to their advantage. The tribunal described the changes as purported and framed its decision as a refusal to unwind them on an interim basis, not as a confirmation that they were valid.

The E&P-controlled Azumah Resources Ghana board has publicly argued that the ruling effectively left E&P's share acquisition intact. The Ibaera-aligned investors read the same order as merely a decision not to grant emergency relief while the ownership question awaits final determination. Both readings exist. The tribunal's own words defer the substantive question rather than resolving it.

A second, later ruling has become the operative one. In an award dated 23 October 2025, the ICC tribunal ordered E&P to stop trespassing on, occupying, or otherwise interfering with the Black Volta and Sankofa mine sites. That is the Interim Award referenced in the English court proceedings.

Two versions of what happened next

The last quarter of 2025 is where the accounts diverge most sharply. E&P has said it completed the full $100 million payment through the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID), with transfers routed via that bank to the two offshore investor entities, approximately $91.9 million to IGIC in Singapore and roughly $8.07 million to Cangol.

It described this as the final settlement that made it the sole owner of Azumah Resources Ghana Ltd and Upwest Resources Ltd. E&P-aligned figures pointed to Registrar-General filings dated 3 September 2025 recording E&P as sole shareholder of both companies, and announced that the foreign directors had resigned and the board had been reconstituted as wholly Ghanaian. On that basis, the E&P-controlled Azumah Resources Ghana pressed ahead, and in December 2025 it was reported to have signed an equipment supply agreement worth around $37 million with the global engineering firm FLSmidth.

The Ibaera-aligned investors reject the significance of those payments. Their position, in essence, is that transferring money into bank accounts does not cure a transaction they say was never validly authorised in the first place, and so, from their standpoint, the ownership of the project never lawfully changed hands. This is why, rather than treating the matter as closed, they went to court in England to enforce the arbitration ruling. E&P and the investors continue to describe the same set of events in incompatible terms, and independent confirmation of the ultimate legal effect of the payments is precisely what remains outstanding.

The English High Court steps in

On 8 June 2026, the High Court of Justice in England and Wales, before Mr Justice Andrew Baker, addressed the October 2025 Interim Award. Acting under section 66 of the Arbitration Act 1996, the standard mechanism by which an arbitral award can be given the force of a court judgment, the court granted the claimants, listed as IGIC, Cangol and Azumah Resources Pty Ltd, permission to enforce the award as if it were an order of the court.

The order recorded that E&P had failed to comply with the Interim Award, directed the firm to pay the claimants' costs of the application in the sum of £33,309.86 within fourteen days, and gave E&P fourteen days to apply to have the order set aside, with enforcement paused until that window closed.

The English proceedings are also how the confidential arbitration first came to public light, since the award surfaced during the enforcement hearing. According to the investors, that second ruling has also gone unheeded. E&P, through its legal department, has disputed the premise entirely, telling reporters that the firm is neither occupying the Black Volta site nor operating the mine or extracting its resources, and that it has instructed lawyers to seek to set aside the English court's order.  

The regulatory backdrop

The dispute has unfolded against a broader reshaping of Ghana's mining rules, which has moved to increase local ownership across the sector. New regulations require surface mining to be carried out by wholly Ghanaian-owned companies and underground operations to be at least half locally owned, and international miners have reported being pushed toward local contractors.

Supporters frame Black Volta as a landmark case of indigenous ownership, potentially the first large-scale gold mine financed and built by a wholly Ghanaian firm, while foreign investors and some analysts have voiced concern about the message the episode sends about contract enforcement and the security of foreign investment in Africa's leading gold producer.

The role of the ECOWAS Bank

One of the more unusual features of the saga is the involvement of the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID), the regional development bank that agreed to finance E&P's acquisition. The financing was unveiled at a signing ceremony in Accra on 7 July 2025, an event the international investors publicly distanced themselves from at the time.

In statements issued that July, before the disputed share transfer, the then investor-controlled Azumah Resources Ghana urged regulators and the public to disregard what it called a staged event and insisted that E&P held no shares in the company. The bank's participation in financing a transaction that one of the underlying parties was actively disputing has itself drawn commentary in Ghana about governance and due diligence, given the development bank's mandate.

Government intervention

By July 2026, with the dispute spilling repeatedly into the press, Ghana's Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, intervened directly. In a communication dated 10 July 2026, the minister gave the two companies a final period of seven days to resolve the matter amicably, warning that if the deadline passed without agreement, a decision would be taken in the best interest of the country.

He urged the parties to step back from litigating the fight through the media and directed the Minerals Commission to support a resolution so that development of the project could proceed. Both sides, according to reporting, expect the ICC tribunal to deliver a final judgment at a hearing scheduled for September 2026, the ruling most likely to bring definitive legal clarity to the question of who owns Black Volta.

A final arbitration ruling in the UK is expected in September 2026. Everything beyond that framework- whether a valid sale occurred, whether signatures were forged, whether payment completed a lawful transfer- remains contested between the parties and unresolved by any final judgment.