The Export-Import Bank has an application in front of it for an iron ore mine and a pellet plant in Minnesota, and the notice states that the financing will be used for domestic purposes
The Export-Import Bank of the United States finances exports. The application it filed notice of on Friday morning is for a mine and a plant in Minnesota, and the notice says, in its own words, that the financing will be used for domestic purposes.
That sentence is not a slip. It is the point.
EXIM has received an application for final commitment for a long-term loan or financial guarantee in excess of $100m. The obligor is Mesabi Metallics Company LLC. The money would develop an iron ore mine in the Mesabi Range and a direct reduction iron plant at Nashwauk, Minnesota, rated at 7.5 million tonnes a year, under what the notice calls the agency's Make More in America initiative.
Three guarantors are named alongside the obligor: Miranda Mineral Resources LLC, Mesabi Financing Corp and Mesabi Land 1 LLC.
Where the export is
An export credit agency publishing a notice about a Minnesota mine invites an obvious question, and the notice answers it directly rather than leaving it to be inferred.
The items being exported, it says, will be direct reduction iron pellets. The financing is domestic. The output is not, or not entirely: the pellets will be used domestically and exported internationally as required under the Make More in America programme. So the export sits at the far end of the transaction, in the product, rather than in the equipment or the borrower.
The principal supplier is given as various United States entities. None is named.
Two descriptions of the same deal
The summary paragraph says the proposed transaction supports the development of critical mineral resources essential to resilient domestic supply chains and advanced manufacturing.
The purpose paragraph, a few lines further down, describes an iron ore mine and a plant making pellets that the notice calls key to electric arc furnace steel making.
Both descriptions are the agency's own, in one document, about one transaction. This item takes no view on which is the better label, and readers who want to form one have the whole notice linked underneath.
What the notice withholds
The amount. Beyond the statutory threshold that triggered the notice in the first place, no figure for the loan or the guarantee appears anywhere in the document, and none for the project either.
There is no total cost, no jobs number and no construction schedule. The application reference is printed as AP300126XX.
The notice carries its own explanation for at least some of that. It states that it excludes confidential or proprietary business information, information whose disclosure would violate the Trade Secrets Act, and information that would jeopardise United States jobs by handing competitors something they could use.
The clock, and where the answer lands
Publication is set for 17 August, and comments are due 25 days after that, which is 11 September. They go to the EXIM board of directors before it takes final action.
The notice rests on section 3(c)(10) of the Export-Import Bank Act of 1945, the provision that requires this kind of public notice above $100m in the first place. It is signed by Matthew Paprocki, an attorney advisor at the bank.
There will be no announcement of the outcome. The document points readers instead to the summary minutes of the board's meetings, which is where the decision on this application will appear.
