About this report

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Dear stakeholders

AngloGold Ashanti's Report to Society 2005 is the company's fourth such report, and the third which seeks to report, methodically, against both the company's own values and business principles, and against the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative, which remains the most broadly used standard of corporate triple bottom line reporting. Again, key sections have been assured by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

As always, we hope you find this document to be a useful and objectively presented assessment of AngloGold Ashanti's operations. We welcome your feedback. For the second time, we are also publishing operation- or country-specific reports, to ensure a more focused examination is available to stakeholders local to specific operations.

As will become apparent as you explore this document, it has been an eventful year for this company. I would like to draw your attention to three areas.

First, and perhaps most gratifyingly, 2005 saw the biggest qualitative improvement in dealing with the company's biggest public health challenge, HIV/AIDS, since the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in 2002. Internationally, the biggest obstacle has been developing individual awareness of the disease due to the factors of stigma and denial, even as the quality of available treatment has improved. In South Africa, where some 66% of the company's workforce is employed and where the prevalence of HIV is greatest, more than 10,000 employees underwent voluntary counselling and testing during 2005, a 150% increase on the previous year. This was due to intensive awareness work carried out by the management of our HIV/AIDS programme, working in close co-operation with mine management, and with the assistance of a significantly increased number of peer counsellors. It is critical that these efforts continue and intensify.

Second, the company's safety performance, as measured by fatality rates, showed a marked improvement for the second consecutive year, most notably at our deep level South African mines, suggesting that the technical and human advancements are bearing fruit. The aspiration to step-change improvement we began talking about some years ago has, arguably, been achieved. However, whatever the improvement in fatality rates, 25 people died in accidents in our service. We cannot rest until death and serious injury in our operations has been eliminated. And accidents that occurred in the early months of 2006, too, warn us that we cannot afford to become complacent.

The third issue to which I would like to draw your attention that has occupied our time and minds is the matter of operating in what are called areas of weak governance. You will be aware of public controversy that occurred regarding our activities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the course of the year. That matter, and AngloGold Ashanti's response to it, is dealt with in a comprehensive case study to be found on page EG10 of this report, so I won't repeat it at length here.

For companies like AngloGold Ashanti, which seek to uphold socially responsible values, under what conditions in such societies is the continued pursuit of business activities justified, and when is it not? One basis of our existence is a commitment that our host countries and communities should be better off for our having been there.

We have a clear policy that, if we are unable to conduct our activities with integrity, we would withdraw. That inevitably involves a degree of subjective risk calculation. That means that, with even the best of intentions, businesses of integrity can err, leaving them open to reputational damage.

One of the key issues facing corporations seeking to act in the best interests of all of their shareholders in a world rightly concerned simultaneously with human rights and the development imperative is finding a balance between wealth creation at any cost and preservation and conservation at any price. This is a debate which must be conducted in the public domain, and which, amongst its many objectives, should seek to establish the public norms on which to base business and corporate social responsibility decisions. Some of the important questions which must be addressed are: who decides at what point it becomes legitimate for business to operate in a relatively unstable society; and what determines whether a business activity in such an environment enhances prospects for economic growth, stability and democracy, or strengthens the hand of those opposed to democratic reform?

We at AngloGold Ashanti will continue to examine these questions as we must, both internally and through a variety of representative industry bodies. We will also continue to engage community and civil society institutions and non-governmental organisations and in public debate and would happily do so with anyone else wishing to engage us.

Bobby Godsell
6 March 2006