A Chinese consortium has paid top dollar for Glencore’s Las Bambas copper mine in Peru. The price of 4.3 billion euros was towards the top end of analysts’ forecasts.<br /><br />The sale was forced on Glencore by the Chinese as the price to pay for its takeover of Xstrata, which Beijing feared would give the miner an over-dominant position in the copper market.<br /><br />The Peruvian mine is due to start production in 2015 at a rate of more than 450,000 tonnes a year for the first five years, and the deal includes China picking up the remaining development costs.
