Obuasi, June 9, GNA- AngloGold Ashanti's commitment to safety practices has led to over 80 per cent improvement in safety at certain critical areas of the company's operations. Mr Christian Rampa Luhembwe, Vice-President of AngloGold Ashanti, West Africa Division, who announced this at Obuasi stressed that "since the corporate launch of "Safety is Our First Value" in November, 2007, AngloGold Ashanti has recorded up to 80 per cent improvement in certain critical areas of safety". Launching the Obuasi Mine chapter of "Safety is Our First Value", the Vice-President said workplace accident frequencies were dropping very fast with that of South Africa, where most of its operations were underground; and that the team registered the longest number of days without fatality in the history of the company. Mr Luhembwe said the right to safe environment was fundamentally, a moral issue that was also important in any business. "Safety and productivity go hand-in-hand. We cannot increase productivity if we do not have safety", the Vice-President said, adding "I cannot see any conflict in these objectives as the processes and actions that would deliver an accident-free workplace are the same processes that would enable us to improve productivity". He announced that the group was beginning to witness some improvements in safety performance in the Obuasi mine, since the beginning of this year.

"One significant achievement this year is that your fatality rate is 300 per cent better than last year", he told the mineworkers and asked them to keep that performance up. Mr John Miller, Managing Director of Obuasi Mine said the launch marked a key cultural change, where safety was not simply something that was expecting to happen as part of their business, but had elevated to "our first value". The Managing Director announced that Obuasi mine had been given the access to the resources the mine needed, to take it out of its current situation of running at a loss.