JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia’s high profile international mining conference was canceled without warning on Monday. Yet its accompanying exhibition remained open to much confusion.
The official excuse, which was announced to conferees at 2.30 p.m., six hours after the scheduled opening of Mena-Ex, was that the conference had encountered “technical issues.”
The mining exhibition, which featured several national stands from countries with extensive mining industries as well as dozens of mining and equipment companies, was allowed to remain open.
The organizers remained tight- lipped. One of them, when pressed, said that he was not in a position to divulge what had gone wrong.
He did however promise to provide an explanation to Arab News next week. A source close to the organizers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that there had been problems with the acquisition of visas for scheduled speakers as they had been applied for too late.
There had also been difficulties obtaining permission from local authorities to stage the exhibition and conference, now in its third year.
The first hint of trouble at Mena-Ex arose when the official opening, timed for Sunday evening, was rescheduled at short notice for Monday evening. This was further compounded when the opening of the conference was pushed forward from 9.30 p.m. to 11 a.m. and then rescheduled to 2.30 p.m.
The major mining and equipment exhibition, running in tandem with the conference, was for unexplained reasons allowed to remain open.
However, within an hour after the official closure announcement, it appeared smaller exhibitors had cut their losses, anticipating limited numbers of public visitors and therefore sales and contacts, who would have been attracted to a headline conference.
Larger organizations that had invested millions of riyals in large displays remained.
A spokesman for one major mining concern exhibiting at the event, said that moving was simply not financially worth it for the sake of a couple of days.
“We will make the best of it,” he said cheerfully. “Much of the reason for being here is to make contacts and address the acquisition of business in various forms from the mining and equipment companies who are here as exhibitors. So for us at least, there is something to salvage.”
Abdullah Dabbagh, CEO of Ma’aden, has described the mining industry as the potential “third pillar of the Saudi economy”. Already, after the mining code was relaxed in 2005 to attract overseas investment, serious headway has been made in expanding the industry.
Mena-Ex 2010, which staged its inaugural exhibition in 2008, is the official conference and exhibition focusing on the vast mineral exploration and extraction business potential of the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries.
Designed to promote interest in the area and place the Kingdom on the world map as a stable center for exploration both inside Saudi borders and across the Mena area, the closure for whatever undisclosed reason is a major public relations and business disaster.
Coupled with the cancellation of JEF last year, it sends a question mark to foreign investors looking at business possibilities in the Kingdom.
