⚠ Jurisdiction & Political RiskHigh threat

Gold does not care about borders, and much of the world's best remaining gold sits in countries where the rule of law is thin and the government's appetite for a bigger share is thick. This is the second great risk to Barrick, and it is inseparable from the first advantage: the very irreplaceability that makes Tier-One deposits valuable also means a miner must go where the gold is, which is frequently somewhere politically dangerous.

The live example is Mali, where a dispute with the government over the Loulo-Gounkoto complex¹ — one of Barrick's flagship mines — escalated into the state asserting control, detaining staff, blocking exports, and seizing gold, effectively wresting a crown-jewel asset from the company's hands. It is the sharpest illustration imaginable of the difference between owning a mine on paper and controlling it in practice. Nor is Mali unique: Barrick has fought long tax and ownership battles in Tanzania, operates a vast asset in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and is staking its copper future on Reko Diq in Pakistan.

Resource nationalism tends to intensify at exactly the worst moment for a miner. When the gold price is high and the mines are gushing cash, governments see a foreign company extracting a national treasure and grow determined to capture more of it — through higher royalties, forced ownership stakes, export controls, or seizure. So the political risk rises precisely when the profits do, capping the very upside that the price windfall creates.

Barrick manages this risk as well as anyone can — through diversification across many countries, patient relationship-building with governments, and a long institutional memory of these fights — and its scale gives it more leverage in negotiations than a small miner would have. But manage is all it can do; it cannot eliminate the risk, because it cannot move the gold to a safer country. Mali showed how such disputes end: it was resolved in December 2025 on the government's terms, including the 2023 Mining Code, after close to twelve months without production, and the mine was ramping up ahead of plan by mid-2026². A meaningful share of Barrick's asset base will always sit on ground where the company's ownership is, in the last resort, only as secure as the local government allows. That is a permanent discount that no operational excellence can erase, and a threat that belongs near the very top of any honest assessment.