Land and displacement: The waste-storage facility planned west of Rovina would require the expropriation and resettlement of residents in an area that has recently seen young families move in to farm and build a nature-tourism economy – a trend the mine would reverse as well as destroy in terms of Self-Sustaining Livelihoods. A technical assessment by David M. Chambers, Ph.D. in 2022, found that the company had not adequately addressed compensation for directly affected families or risks to public health, including drinking water. 

One-sided consultations: Between 2021 and 2024, Euro Sun subsidiary Samax held a series of meetings with residents and local officials that deliberately excluded known opponents to the project. They presented only the project's benefits while downplaying environmental and health risks; thus deepening local mistrust and divisions. Similar messaging ran through social media and the mainstream press, promising jobs and development for an underdeveloped region, alongside company-funded CSR projects. 

Community organising and legal wins: Landowners in Bucureşci, Criscior and Buceş have organised as "Dezvoltăm Durabil Zona Munților Metaliferi" and the "Ecou Rovina Bucureșci" Association, opposing the project for years with backing from the Save Roşia Montanǎ network. "I’ve asked Euro Sun several times what they intend to do if people refuse to sell their land to make way for this mine – and I’m yet to receive a response," said local landowner Adriana Maucher. 

In 2022, 15,917 citizens signed a petition calling on the Ministry of Environment for an official impact assessment. In November 2021, Maucher donated land within the project footprint – directly under the future tailings ponds – to the NGO Declic, thereby blocking construction planned for 2022, since the mine’s development depends on securing all property rights across its footprint. Declic went on to buy land at the epicentre of the Colnic open pit in 2023. 

Gold and copper open-pit mining is among the most greenhouse-gas-intensive extractive activities. Rovina's own Environmental Report acknowledges this directly, stating in its "Climate" chapter that the project is a direct emitter of greenhouse gases. Clearing some 200 hectares of forest removes an existing carbon sink at the same time as adding new emissions sources, a double climate cost the company has never quantified.

Despite this acknowledgment, no genuine climate impact study exists. It presents no emissions figures, no scenarios, no mitigation plan, no consultation record.

That absence is striking given the well-documented emissions from similar operations. Haul trucks are consistently found to be a large source of emissions at an open-pit mine. The choice of open-pit method compounds this: open-pit mines generate roughly twice as much CO2 per ounce of gold produced as undergound mines, since open-pit operations process about five times the volume of ore for a comparable yield. Because Rovina is planned as an open-pit operation across two deposits, its emissions-per-ounce are structurally worse than an underground alternative would have been. Euro Sun's public messaging around the absence of cyanide and wet tailings, while relevant to toxic-waste risk, does nothing to address this category of emissions. Mine closure and post-closure maintenance are also not detailed in terms of emissions, as tailings and waste-rock management typically continue to require energy for grading, monitoring and water treatment long after extraction ends, with long-term structural stability and monitoring requirements extending far beyond the operational period. 

Finally, regarding the company's forest-clearance plans, most carbon emissions from deforestation occur immediately, while above-ground biomass in a replacement forest can take 60-100 years to recover to old-growth carbon-stock levels. As such, felling mature forest releases decades of accumulated carbon stock within months, while any replacement sink would take decades to reabsorb even a fraction of that amount. 

This gap was significant enough that Romanian courts cited it, alongside missing transboundary and biodiversity assessments, as grounds of annulling the project's environmental permit in 2023 and again on appeal in 2024. In short: Rovina has no independent, quantified estimate of its annual or lifetime greenhouse gas emissions, only a one-paragraph admission that the mine will emit substantial greenhouse gases, with nothing to measure or manage that impact. 

Protected areas: The project footprint borders the Vulcan Mountain nature reserve (IUCN category IV and Natura 2000 site). The Cluj Court of Appeal's 2024 ruling found the environmental permit unlawful partly because it lacked an Article 6(3) Habitats Directive assessment and failed to evaluate the project's possible significant impact on the Rovina Valley stream and nearby Natura 2000 sites.

Tailings dam design: The proposal would divert an underground river and store waste at both open pits using an unlined co-disposal facility and a separate cell for acid-generating tailings, both built to an "upstream" design, recognised as the highest-risk type of tailings-dam construction (the same design category implicated in 2014 Mount Polley dam failure in Canada). Independent expert David Chambers (CSP2, 2022) found the company’s own Technical Report does not rule out long-term acid rock drainage – it acknowledges the risk “could take decades” to materialise but does not address it – and the Technical Report contains no surface- or groundwater-quality predictions at all, which he called “a significant gap for any project assessment.” 

Water contamination and cross-border risk: Goundwater is the typical source for drinking and for agricultural and livestock usage in the area. Euro Sun proposes an alternative drinking-water network, without providing clarity on whether it covers all current uses or secured community agreement. The 2024 court ruling also found no transboundary impact assessment had been carried out, even though pollution could reach Hungary via the Crişuri Oradea groundwater body (ROCR01) and the Crişul Alb river. Mine-closure costs (estimated at US$20 million) exclude long-term water treatment, and the Technical Report assumes, without solid justification, that these costs will be covered by selling used equipment. 

Weak financial feasibility: By international standards, the ore grade is very low (0.16% Cu, 0.42 g/t Au), less than half the grade of the Roşia Poieni copper mine and far below operating copper mines in Spain or Greece. Between 2021 and 2024, the estimated mineral resource fell by 48% without explanation (Technical Report NI 43-101). 

Reputational and financial track record: Euro Sun Mining (formerly Carpathian Gold) nearly went bankrupt after its Riacho dos Machados project in Brazil (2013-2014, rescued through a lender-forced restructuring). The company changed its name in 2016 partly to shed that history, and surfaced in the Panama Papers through a link to Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian firm at the centre of the scandal. The company reported net losses of over US$10 million in both 2020 and 2021 and over US$3 million in 2025. 

Trafigura and Glencore links: Trafigura is Rovina's primary commercial and financial partner (see Financiers below) and has its own record of proven corruption: in March 2024 it pleaded guilty in the US to a decade-long bribery scheme involving Brazil's state oil company Petrobras, paying over US$126 million in fines and forfeiture, and in January 2025 a Swiss federal court convicted the company of bribing an Angolan state-oil official, ordering it to pay over US$148 million in fines and compensation. Glencore, which signed an October 2024 memorandum for a possible secondary offtake role, has its own record of corruption convictions in the US and UK (2022). 

Macquarie links: Macquarie Bank is Rovina's institutional debt arranger to leverage Trafigura's existing footprint. Macquarie has faced a string of severe penalties for systemic control failures and deceptive conduct. In March 2026, the bank was hit with a US$35 million penalty for systemic failures and misleading conduct related to the misreporting of tens of millions of short sales over more than a decade. In September 2024, Macquarie was handed a record fine by the Markets Disciplinary Panel for failing to block suspicious, manipulative trading orders on the electricity futures market, a failure regulators described as reflecting "serious, prolonged and potential systemic failures" by the bank. In December 2025, a former Macquarie banker was criminally indicted by German prosecutors in Cologne over his role in the "Cum-Ex" dividend tax fraud scandal, and the bank has already paid over €100 million in settlements to German authorities in connection with the affair. In November 2024, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) fined Macquarie £13 million for serious, prolonged control failures that allowed a single trader to fabricate over 400 fictitious trades undetected for nearly two years. Additionally, in April 2024, the bank was ordered to pay a US$10 million penalty for failure to implement adequate fraud controls, which allowed a corrupt third-party financial adviser to fraudulently withdraw money from clients' cash management accounts undetected for over three years.