Edgar Sengier

Edgar Sengier (born October 9, 1879 in Kortrijk , † July 26, 1963 in Cannes ) was a Belgian mining engineer .

Life

Sengier graduated from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1903 .

Union Minière du Haut Katanga

On April 23, 1885, the owner Leopold II issued a free trade constitution for his Congo Free State. In 1906, the Société générale de Belgique invested in the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK), the Société internationale forestière et minière du Congo (Forminiere, diamonds) and the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga , marketed through these three companies Leopold II. Concessions to exploit his regime . In the Forminiere the invested Anaconda Copper . The general manager of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company , Thomas Fortune Ryan sold the Anaconda shares in the Forminiere to Daniel Guggenheim (industrialist) . Union Minière du Haut Katanga had the concession for mining copper and the cobalt and uranium or radium ores associated with it. The Belgian state held the majority of shares in Union Minière du Haut Katanga . The Tanganyika Concessions Ltd. ( Tanks ) of Sir Robert Williams, 1st Baronet, of Park , held 45% of the shares in Union Minière du Haut Katanga in 1920 . The majority decided a capital increase, which Tanks did not go along with, which is why their stake had dropped to 16% in 1923. One investor was the Société générale de Belgique, which provided the director. From 1918 to 1919 Edgar Sengier was director of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga in Elisabethville . By 1914, 51%, the proportion of employees with Belgian nationality at Union Minière du Haut Katanga had fallen to 22% in 1917. Under the influence of Sengier, it rose to 58% by 1922.

In 1932 Sengier became director of the Société générale de Belgique . The Société générale de Belgique prepared its corporate structure from 1938 for the Second World War. At the beginning of 1939 it became known in specialist circles that Otto Hahn and Fritz Straßmann had made the discovery of nuclear fission of uranium- 235 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1938 . John Lawrence Baird, 1st Viscount Stonehaven , who works for Tanganyika Concessions Ltd. sat on the board of directors of the Union Minière du Haut Katanga , Sengier pointed out a possible energetic use of the metal in May 1939 and arranged a meeting with Henry Tizard . Tizard asked Sengier for an option right for the entire uranium ore production, which Sengier did not want to give because Frédéric Joliot-Curie also obtained his uranium from him. Sengier commissioned director Firmin Van Brée (* 1880 in Anderlecht ; 1960 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz ) to coordinate the Société générale de Belgique interests in Africa.

The Shinkolobwe mine the Union Minière du Haut Katanga delivered 80 of the 1939 world's traded 100 tons of uranium oxides. The Union Minière du Haut Katanga relocated the ore smelting from the main plant in Olen (Belgium) near Antwerp to Katanga and Long Island . Business relationships with the Nichols Copper Company of New York were expanded here. The US government tried to secure the priority supply of cobalt through an agreement within the framework of the International Copper Buyers Association . The Union Miniere du Haut Katanga opened offices in Lisbon , Cape Town and New York City , where it the capital of their local affiliate, the African Metals Corporation Limited , of 25,000 to 250,000 USD increased. In September 1939, Sengier moved into an African Metals office in the Cunard Building and instructed that the uranium in the Olen refinery and the radium stocks in Belgium be relocated to the United Kingdom and the USA. The evacuation of the radium was successful and the uranium ore was confiscated by the Wehrmacht in June 1940 . Uranium ore, which was stockpiled before the Shinkolobwe mine was closed in 1939 due to saturation of the uranium market, was shipped to Long Island. From October 1939, Sengier tried to take significant market shares in the US cobalt market through the Société générale de Belgique . For this purpose, the General Electric International Cooperation was to build a fifth blast furnace in Jadotville with a melting capacity of 1500 to 2000 tons (unit) / year . The War Production Board responsible for strategic products argued that the dependency on US armaments, which before the Second World War got 80% of the cobalt from the Belgian Congo , did not approve of the establishment.

In June 1943, Leslie R. Groves had convinced the US Military Policy Committee that nothing should stand in the way of the United States gaining full control over world uranium supplies. Sengier argued against the desired non-proliferation by an international atomic energy organization. Finally, he signed an agreement and in 1946 the US authorities issued a visa to travel back to Brussels .

He was the recipient of the Medal for Merit , one of the highest civilian awards in the USA.

Web links

Commons : Edgar Sengier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Died, Sir Edgar Sengier . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1963 ( online ).
2. ↑ avae-vvba.be ( Memento from August 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ; PDF)
3. ↑ Gerhard Th Mollin, The USA and Colonialism. America as partner and successor to Belgian power in Africa 1939-1965 . 544 pp., Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1996.
4. ^ A warning about the Last Judgment . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1985 ( online ).

predecessor	Office	successor
Preston K. Horner	Representative of the Société générale de Belgique in Lubumbashi 1918–1919	Jules cousin