Clive Palmer’s latest Canberra tilt bankrolled by Mineralogy millions

Clive Palmer’s once-embattled firm is now collecting more than $1m a day in profit as he vows a fresh tilt at Canberra.

Clive Palmer speaks to the media at the Perth Supreme Court. Picture: AAP

Clive Palmer’s once-embattled private company Mineralogy is now collecting more than $1 million a day in profits, with the former federal MP promising to use his growing cash stockpile to bankroll another aggressive tilt at federal parliament.

Accounts lodged with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission show that Mineralogy posted a $354.7 million profit last financial year, driven by an influx of royalties from his estranged Chinese business partners.

The profit came after Mineralogy outlaid $109.1m in income tax.

The windfall is a remarkable turnaround from a year ago, when the group posted a loss of $6.1m amid signs of widespread stress among Mr Palmer’s business empire.

Since then, Mineralogy and Mr Palmer won a major victory in their ongoing battles with Citic. WA’s Supreme Court last year awarded Mr Palmer hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties from Citic’s Sino Iron mine in the Pilbara, a ruling that also positioned him to collect hundreds of millions more annually for years to come.

Speaking to The Australian, Mr Palmer described the remarkable return to profitability as “not a bad result” and indicated that profits should grow even further as output from Sino Iron continued to grow.

“We also had to pay a lot of expenses that were building up while we weren’t getting paid by Citic so if you look at the profit closely it’s more like $430m or something like that,” he said.

“Their (Citic’s) current production is only half of what it should be so hopefully (the royalty) will double.”

The accounts showed that Mr Palmer had stood down as the sole director of Mineralogy in October, replaced by his wife Anna.

He said the resignation was to clear the way for another run at politics next year.

Mr Palmer, who held the seat of Fairfax in Queensland from 2013 to 2016 and whose Palmer United Party briefly held the balance of power in Canberra, this year rebranded Palmer United as the United Australia Party.

“I’ll be standing for parliament at the next election and we will have the greatest campaign Australia has ever seen starting from January,” he said.

“We’ve had the foreplay, we will get on with the real job in January.”

He said he was currently targeting the seat of Herbert in Queensland, which is home to the Yabulu nickel refinery in Townsville. Yabulu was part of Mr Palmer’s Queensland Nickel, which collapsed into administration in 2016.

The stream of royalties that drove Mineralogy’s profitability was at the centre of an appeal heard in WA this week. Citic was seeking to have last year’s royalty order overturned and replaced by a “fair and reasonable” alternative, but Mr Palmer said he expected any changes to the royalty structure to be minor.

“Their appeal was that the inputs (used to calculate the royalty) should be fair and reasonable, we say they are, and it’s unlikely to change that much materially either way,” he said.