B. Solongoo spent part of her career inside the system she is now describing. A former deputy minister of justice and internal affairs, she served on the government working group that negotiated with Rio Tinto over Oyu Tolgoi. In an interview published by News.mn on Monday, she said the quiet part plainly: the shareholder settlements Rio has been signing abroad strengthen Ulaanbaatar’s negotiating position. A working group that fails to use them is, in her words, committing a serious failure to act and effectively refusing to defend the national interest.
The record she points to is short and expensive. In the autumn of 2025, federal judge Lewis Liman in Manhattan approved Rio Tinto’s $138.75 million settlement with Turquoise Hill investors led by Pentwater Capital. The investors alleged that the company continued to describe the underground expansion as on schedule and on budget even as it slipped by as much as two and a half years and ran about $1.9 billion over budget.
On 28 July, a proposed C$22.7 million settlement notice was issued in Québec for investors who bought securities outside the United States during the same 12-month period spanning 2018 and 2019. An approval hearing is scheduled for 20 October. The respondents include three Rio entities and five individuals, among them former chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques.
Rio admitted no wrongdoing in the first case and denies the allegations in the second. The two proceedings nevertheless offer something potentially more useful to Ulaanbaatar than an admission of guilt: a documentary record of what the operator told its own shareholders about the mine, and when, to which courts and investors have now assigned a price.
Ulaanbaatar has converted this story into material leverage before. Solongoo’s account of the period from 2018 to 2022 runs as follows. The working group established, in her words, that the company had given the government and the public false information about delays to the underground project. What Rio would not provide, the group obtained from former insiders. Two British specialists came to Mongolia in August 2021. The government then converted that leverage into the 2022 reset, under which the $2.4 billion debt attached to the state’s 34% stake, according to contemporary accounts, was written off in full.
The cost audit demanded by the group was never completed, Solongoo says. Cooperation with the informants was later discredited through allegations she describes as false, including claims of money laundering, and, she believes, was ultimately shut down under pressure from the company.
“We hand over our natural resources and keep paying loans and interest. That is financial exploitation.”
Against that history, July’s package looks as limited as it is. The working group announced a 2.5-percentage-point reduction in the shareholder-loan interest rate, bringing it down to 7.9%; a shorter review cycle; a 50% cut in the management fee; and an agreement in principle to pay dividends this year.
Four weeks ago, this column described the package as the win that was within reach. Solongoo’s arithmetic explains why it remains modest. Total project debt is close to $20 billion, equivalent to roughly half of Mongolia’s external debt. Accrued interest on the shareholder loans alone is about $7 billion, more than the original principal. The management fee is still calculated as a percentage of costs, under a formula that rewards the manager when the project overruns.
Hand over the ore and continue paying the loans attached to it. Solongoo’s verdict on that arrangement appears above.
The window she identifies is open this year, and this is the strongest part of her case. Copper prices are close to record levels. Underground production has increased output. According to Solongoo, the project has been profitable since 2025.
The expert estimates she cites suggest that Oyu Tolgoi’s revenue could exceed $8 billion in 2026, with free cash flow reaching $5.2 billion. Mongolia owns 34% of the company. If it distributed about $5 billion in dividends, the state’s share would be roughly $1.5 billion, or close to 6 trillion tugriks.
Her warning is even sharper. The richest and cheapest section of the deposit is being mined now. A state unable to secure dividends during precisely these years risks watching the main benefit flow to the operator and being left, in her words, with the remnants.
The hearings held in December placed the alternative timetable on the record. Under the current cash-flow waterfall, dividends once projected for 2019 would arrive only in 2041.
What changed this summer was the burden of proof. A negotiator no longer needs to establish from scratch what the operator knew about its project in 2018 and 2019. The documentary record is now embedded in two shareholder settlements: one approved, the other priced and awaiting a hearing.
Add two open tax fronts: a $155 million London arbitration concerning the years 2013 to 2015, and a $440 million assessment for 2021 and 2022 that is now being challenged. There is also the record of the December hearings, where the committee concluded, according to Solongoo’s account, that the Investment Agreement had functioned as a credit and financing mechanism rather than as an investment mechanism.
Ulaanbaatar’s file is thicker than at any point since the debt write-off.
Solongoo’s recommendations to the working group are procedural and restrained: submit formal requests for explanations, demand up-to-date disclosure of the project’s true condition, and place the record underlying the settlements on the negotiating table.
We would put the matter more politically. The government has already watched foreign shareholders receive compensation once over the Oyu Tolgoi story and put a price on it a second time. This is happening in the first year in which Mongolia’s own dividend has become mathematically possible.
Unless the government acts, the story will be retold on the streets and at the ballot box in 2027. June’s blockade of the concentrate road, on which Rio declined to comment, was a preview.
The file exists. The window remains open while the richest ore is coming out of the ground. Solongoo gave the cost of leaving the drawer closed a name in Monday’s interview: inaction.
The Editor oversees Central Asia Wire’s editorial output.