Kazakhmys: Never mind the Bozshakol In Ukraine, they are still tearing down statues of Lenin. It can take some time to deal with ex-Soviet legacies. Kazakhmys - a UK-listed, Kazakhstan-based copper miner, the shares of which have fallen 70 per cent this year - essentially has this problem. Soviet ghosts even hang over the company's $1.3bn deal to sell its 50 per cent stake in an unprofitable Kazakh power station to the government of Kazakhstan. The Ekibastuz plant generates a fifth of the country's power. It is treated as strategically important, so third-party buyers were unlikely. That makes the price paid for the stake pretty generous, of course. The plant's carrying value was just $970m. The use of the cash will involve more reckoning with the past. Kazakhmys should be able to pay down debt and plough $800m or so into capital expenditure at two new mechanised mines that promise low-cost production growth: Aktogay and Bozshakol. But at about 44 per cent of sales in the first half of this year, total capex is high. Kazakhmys is absorbing $350m in cost overruns at Bozshakol rather than delay its start beyond 2015. The haste is necessary. Kazakhmys has some of the highest cash costs in copper mining. Its older mines are Soviet throwbacks, company towns included. The new mines will need only 6 per cent of a roughly 53,000-strong workforce to function - making for a politically tricky transition. There is an alternative to a cash-gobbling Kazakh copper miner - a cash-generative one. Central Asia Metals, an Aim-listed miner with a £220m market capitalisation, wants to pay 20 per cent of revenues back to shareholders, Investec notes. Low cash costs of operations (about $1,700 a tonne) favour this punchy dividend, partly because of their nature: recovering copper from waste dumps left behind by older mines. It is one way to confront a post-Soviet problem.