Coal of Africa Limited (CoAL) has further extended its black economic empowerment agreement with Coal Investments Limited (CIL), the coal development company said last week.

The agreement between CoAL and CIL was first announced in June last year and while the company originally anticipated completing the transaction by December last year, it has since had to extend the closure of the deal to the end of April.

It has now extended the completion date to the end of July.

CIL consequently subscribed for shares and was granted an option, which if exercised, would result in African Global Capital (AGC), CIL and their affiliates holding in excess of 26percent of the shares in the CoAL.

This ensures CoAL's compliance with South African broad-based BEE legislative requirements that mining companies transfer at least 26percent of their equity to empowerment groups by 2014.

In terms of the agreement, CIL, AGC and their affiliates agreed to use commercially reasonable endeavours to transfer their holdings in the company into a BEE group to ensure that CoAL was fully compliant with BEE requirements.

CoAL said since the end of December AGC, CIL and their affiliates had progressed the transfer of their holdings in the company into an empowerment group, but the process was still ongoing and had not been completed as at the end of April as planned. - I-Net Bridge