In the last weeks of May, as Mineral Resources began to struggle under a $4.4 billion debt load, the iron ore and lithium miner’s managing director, Chris Ellison, pulled out the company chequebook to do a deal worth tens of millions of dollars. It turns out he had personal skin in the game.

But the big investment in rezoned industrial land north of Perth would remain a mystery to shareholders, mentioned only in passing in the company’s annual report published three months later.