It was a meeting whispered about as Fortescue’s version of the “red wedding” scene from Game of Thrones, in which a slew of characters were killed off in one sitting. Fortescue’s executive chairman, Andrew Forrest, refers to it as “judgment day”, which in the Bible is God’s final sorting of people into the saved and the damned.

Appropriately, it took place in the “red cafe” at the company’s Perth headquarters, so named for its colour scheme. And it was a bloodbath. One person who was there says Fortescue’s chief executive at the time, Elizabeth Gaines, was in tears, while the rest of the company’s C-suite was rattled and emotional.