Liberia has refused to soften its multiuser rail policy in ongoing negotiations with ArcelorMittal, insisting that the steel producer's railway concessions must remain open to third-party users, the Liberian Observer reports.

The position sets the government on a collision course with one of the country's largest investors. ArcelorMittal has operated the railway linking iron ore mining areas to Liberia's export terminals under its concession arrangements, and the question of who else may run trains over those tracks has become the central point of friction in the current round of talks.

Liberia's government has framed the multiuser principle as non-negotiable. Under the policy, the rail infrastructure built and rehabilitated under mining concessions must be available to other operators, including rival mining companies seeking to move their own ore and bulk freight to port. The government argues that a single-purpose line serving one miner constrains the country's ability to develop additional resource projects that depend on affordable rail access to export capacity.

For ArcelorMittal, the stakes run in the opposite direction. The company has invested in restoring and operating the railway, and any commitment to carry third-party traffic raises questions of capacity allocation, scheduling priority, maintenance responsibility and the pricing of access. Negotiations must therefore resolve not only the principle of shared access but the commercial and operational terms under which it would function — who pays for track upkeep, how train paths are allocated when demand exceeds capacity, and what tariffs apply.

The dispute touches a broader pattern in resource-linked railway concessions across Africa, where governments increasingly treat rail corridors built around a single mine as national infrastructure that should serve multiple users. Liberia's insistence on the multiuser model signals that future amendments to mining and rail concessions will be judged against that standard rather than negotiated away for individual operators.

No resolution date has been set, and the outcome will shape how additional mining projects in the corridor reach export markets in the years ahead.