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 commerciall
The report indicates that 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.
It further notes that 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 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.
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 stated 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 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.
