Five days after The Australian Financial Review reported that Mineral Resources founder Chris Ellison ran an offshore tax scheme for 10 years, the MinRes board is still to answer two core questions: when did they find out about it, and why didn’t they tell shareholders?

Chairman James McClement told investors on Monday that a board investigation of the matter was “well advanced”, while minimising the seriousness of the issue and expressing “full confidence” in Ellison. MinRes filed its annual corporate governance statement five minutes later.