London gold body goes on trial over two deaths at Tanzania's North Mara mine

The London Bullion Market Association went into the High Court on Wednesday to answer a claim that it owed a duty of care to the families of two artisanal miners killed at Tanzania's North Mara gold mine in 2019. The case, filed in 2022 by the British firm Leigh Day, is the first phase of a trial due to run until 9 November, with closing submissions set for 19 and 20 November. Former attorney general Dominic Grieve KC leads the barrister team for the claimants. Thirty further Tanzanian claims, alleging other killings, gunshot wounds and torture, have been stayed until this phase ends.

The two men at the centre of the opening claim were both 23. Their families, granted anonymity as AAA and AAB, say the men were shot in separate incidents in July and December 2019 while prospecting for gold at North Mara. They allege the shooters were members of the Tanzanian police, private security guards, or both. The LBMA says any loss of life is a tragedy. It rejects the claim. Its case is that the suit misreads its role: it accredits refiners, not mines, and it does not run the pit at North Mara.

The link the families draw runs through the Good Delivery List. The LBMA keeps that list, which is the wholesale standard for gold and silver bars. Only bars on the list are eligible for settlement in the London over-the-counter market, the largest of its kind. The list's rules tell refiners not to take gold from sources tied to human-rights abuses, conflict or crime. The claimants say the LBMA was negligent in keeping India-based MMTC-PAMP on the list while that refiner took gold from North Mara in 2019, despite reports of abuses at the mine. They say a suspension, or a threat of one, would have pressed the refiner, and through it Acacia and later Barrick, to stop the conduct they allege.

That chain is the whole case. A duty of care from an industry body in London to a prospector at a pit in Tanzania is not an ordinary negligence fact. The court has to decide whether the accreditation decision was close enough to the harm, and whether the LBMA had assumed a responsibility its own rulebook describes. If the answer is no, the Good Delivery List remains a trade standard with a complaints process, not a duty enforceable by a victim's family. If the answer is yes, every refiner on the list inherits a litigation path that does not stop at the mine gate.

North Mara has a paper trail outside this trial. Rights groups have published accounts of shootings around the pit for more than a decade, under Acacia and then under Barrick, which took control of the mine. The company has disputed many of those accounts and has pointed to agreements with local communities and to its own investigations. This trial will not retry every one of those incidents. It will hear the two 2019 deaths, and it will hear what the LBMA knew about the refiner's source when it left MMTC-PAMP on the list.

The stayed claims show how wide the file could become. Thirty more people allege killings, wounds or torture, and they are waiting on the duty question. A finding that the LBMA owed no duty ends those claims in this court. A finding that it did opens a second round, with more names and more dates. Civil society groups including RAID, Global Witness and the London Mining Network framed Wednesday as a test of the market's responsible-sourcing claim. The LBMA's defence is that the test misstates who certifies what.

The open question at the end of the first phase is narrow enough to state. Did the body that decides which bars London will settle owe a legal duty to two men shot at a mine whose gold, the families say, reached an accredited refiner? The answer is for the judge, on evidence that runs to 9 November. Until then the Good Delivery List still settles the London trade, and North Mara still ships gold.