Baffinland owes northern businesses and organizations $27M
Company’s total debt is $2.6B, twice as big as initially reported, according to court-ordered creditors list
Baffinland is $2.6 billion in debt, with more than $27 million owing to northern organizations, according to a list published as part of its court-supervised protection from creditors. (File photo)
Baffinland’s debt amounts to more than double what it originally reported in May, with $27 million of that owed to a dozen northern and Inuit businesses and organizations.
The Oakville, Ont.-based mining company, which operates the Mary River iron mine on northern Baffin Island, published a list of 231 creditors on May 22 as part of creditor protection proceedings that have been ongoing in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice since May 15.
Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. owes a total of $2.6 billion, according to the document, as of May 14. That’s almost $1.6 billion more than what the company initially reported. The court filings include these totals in US dollars, which Nunatsiaq News has converted to Canadian dollars.
Baffinland spokesperson Peter Akman didn’t respond to a request for comment to account for the change in the company’s debt.
“Baffinland has been falling behind on several of its obligations for some time,” Qikiqtani Inuit Association spokesperson Karen Flaherty wrote in an email to Nunatsiaq News on Monday.
The association is on the creditor list, showing $2.8 million owed to it.
Flaherty said that number does not “reflect QIA‘s position regarding the amounts owed” and that the association is “participating actively in the court process to ensure … Baffinland’s obligations to Inuit are honoured.”
The money owed to QIA includes the company’s “outstanding obligations” under the Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement and commercial lease agreements, she said.
Baffinland also owes Qikiqtani Industries, a subsidiary of QIA-owned Qikiqtaaluk Corp., $17.2 million.
The Government of Nunavut is on the list as well, with $3.7 million owed to it. Finance Department spokesperson Hala Duale declined to comment on the nature of this debt.
Most of the creditors are international corporations. The lenders with the largest totals include United Arab Emirates-based IRH Global Trading Ltd., owed $487 million; the Anglo-Swiss mining company Glencore — which operates the Raglan Mine in Nunavik — owed $332 million; the American investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, owed $254 million.
Glencore and Oaktree declined to comment and IRH Global Trading couldn’t be reached.
Baffinland also has outstanding loans from several Canadian banks, as well as the federal government.
Over the past decade, the company took at least four loans from Export Development Canada, said its spokesperson, Zoé de Bellefeuille. The company owes the Crown corporation more than $100 million.
“We refinanced our existing loan with Baffinland in November 2025 to help the company maintain liquidity and support operations and employment,” de Bellefeuille wrote in an email Monday.
Baffinland’s financial troubles are linked partly to its failed Phase 2 railway expansion proposal. The company spent more than $1.5 billion on a proposed expansion that was ultimately rejected by the federal government after years of hearings and opposition from some north Baffin communities.
As a result, Baffinland lacks the liquidity to buy fuel before this year’s sealift shipping window closes, which may force the mine to “cease operations entirely,” the company said in the documents it filed to Ontario courts.
Fuel distributor World Fuel Services Corporation is also on the creditors’ list, showing $39.7 million in unpaid debt.
Despite that, Baffinland has said it expects no disruptions to the mine’s operations and day-to-day decision-making, Akman wrote in an email to Nunatsiaq News in May.
Doing business in Canada in general, and especially in the far North is extremally difficult and expensive. Brazil and Australia will happily supply the market with Iron Ore, I am sorry for the local Inuit which will be the most impacted, they have to go back to hunting to sustain their lifestyle or move South.
You ain’t from around here, buddy.
Lets not pretend that Baffinland was in any way some sort of saviour to the Inuit.
Not wasn’t, but Baffinland is 25% of Nunavut’s Gross Domestic Product(GDP), do you realize that impact that has on Nunavut’s economy
The only benefits Inuit get from the mines is a discounted airfare rates and nothing else. You got to be delusional if you think mining is the only source of income for Nunavut.
Please continue to pretend to be out of touch with reality.
Baffinland is owned by The Energy and Minerals Group, with a majority share, and ArcelorMittal, with a minority share.
The Energy and Minerals Group is a private equity firm, so it does not post financial statements. However, their website does say it has $12B worth of assets under management, and has returned $14B in investment revenue to its partners to date, and is capable of targeted equity investment in the range of $150M to $1B.
ArcelorMittal is a publicly traded company with $97B in assets, $54B in equity, and $8B in working capital.
What may be the case here is not that Baffinland cannot pay its creditors, but that a difference of opinion has formed between its owners who should pay what, and/or whether they each want to maintain, increase or decrease their ownership in this struggling company.
Not how it works. These companies created Baffinland to protect themselves from this exact situation. It operates as its own entity, owned by but legally separate from those entities, so that when all is going well, profits can go to those companies, but when things go bad (say, $2.6 billion in debt bad), the owned company (Baffinland) goes through the bankruptcy process and those companies that own it are not on the hook for what the company they own owes.
Sell it to the Chinese, they will make a profit, or leave it in the ground, 300 Inuit are only 1 percent of Nunavuts population, there are other operating mines in Nunavut that will employ trained Inuit,
Nunatsiaq can you post the list?
So what about the Rail road?