By Katrina Manson
FREETOWN (Reuters) - Sierra Leone will complete a review of all mining contracts within the next three months to resolve disputes over licences awarded under the previous government, President Ernest Bai Koroma said in an interview.
Koroma, who won a close election last September in the small West African state, said he had called in experts from the World Bank to conduct the study which will affect all foreign and local miners operating in the ore-rich former British colony.
Mining accounts for 90 percent of the country's exports but the industry is a shadow of its former self after its commercial mines were stripped during a 1991-2002 civil war.
"We inherited a situation in which two licences were given for exploration or mining in one location. We have at least three or four such situations," Koroma told Reuters in his office at State House in the capital Freetown late on Monday.
"We only will say that everybody will be given a fair trial. At the end of the process they themselves will be a lot more comfortable to proceed," he said.
The review would affect companies including bauxite miner Argyll Resources, and iron ore miners the London Mining Company and the Sierra Leone Development Company.
Koroma said the disputed contracts, along with broader worries over corruption which have long cramped Sierra Leone's business image, had made it harder to attract investors to the mining sector, still struggling to recover from the war.
The two biggest direct investors in Sierra Leone are mining companies -- UK-listed Titanium Resources Group, which mines rutile and bauxite, and Koidu Holdings SA, a kimberlite diamond operation owned by Israeli diamond magnate Beny Steinmetz.
Other mining firms operating in the West African country include Cluff Gold and exploration company West African Diamonds , both listed in London.
Koroma pledged that the World Bank team would be neutral, credible, and backed by experience in resolving mining disputes in other African countries.
"In the next three months we will have started and completed the review. We are pushing it very, very hard now," Koroma said.
"The sooner we get done with that the better for the mining industry. It will settle all of these little issues that are putting the whole activity on hold," he said.
Sierra Leone is home to significant deposits of diamonds, gold, rutile, bauxite and iron ore among others, yet the benefits of its riches have yet to reach most of the general population, 70 percent of whom live below the poverty line.
The country, which is ranked the least developed in the world by the United Nations, has the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality.
"When (the review) is conducted, we hope to lay to rest all of the difficulties we have in this mining sector and open it up because it has a huge potential," Koroma said.
"We only need to sanitise the whole industry. And when we sanitise it, I think it will get into activity again."
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/ )
