Elliott Management leads race for BHP coal mines

BHP is looking at a sale or a demerger of the assets as part of a commitment to diversify away from the coal industry.

The competition to buy BHP’s coal mines has narrowed in the final stages, with Elliott Management viewed as potentially in the box seat to buy the assets as it takes on Indonesian rivals BUMA and Sinar Mas Group.

DataRoom can reveal that Elliott has tapped Bank of America as part of its efforts to buy BHP’s assets.

There are two other Indonesian groups that remain in the round two phase, but sources say that at least two other parties that initially did not make it through to the final stages of the competition have been brought back into the process to ensure that plenty of competitive tension remains.

China-backed Yancoal had been ushered through to the second round, but earlier dropped out.

The two Indonesian groups left in the contest are Indonesia’s second-largest coal mining contractor BUMA and Sinar Mas Group – the controlling company of Golden Energy in Singapore, which owns most of Australia’s Stanmore Coal.

Australian listed coal miners Whitehaven Coal and New Hope did not make it past the first round of the competition.

DataRoom understands that final bids are due shortly for the portfolio comprising BHP’s Mt Arthur thermal coal mine in NSW, the stake it owns in its Cerrejon thermal coal mine in Colombia and two metallurgical coal mines in Queensland held as part of an alliance agreement with Mitsui Coal known as BMC.

Working on BHP’s coal assets have been Macquarie Capital, UBS, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan.

All of the interest is understood to focus at least on the more attractive BMC metallurgical coal assets, and whether the offers also include the Mt Arthur operation remains unclear.

The thinking is that Stanmore Coal, which owns metallurgical coal assets in Queensland, would not have the capacity to buy more than the BMC mines.

Elliott is believed to be competing for the assets with US-listed coal miner Peabody Energy, of which it owns about 30 per cent. The US group is also a BHP investor, with a holding of about 5 per cent, and it is the activist group that lobbied for the global mining giant, listed in Australia and Britain, to abandon its dual-listed structure and put pressure on the company to sell its shale gas assets in the US.

The understanding is that its offer involves some cash, but may be by way of a creative structure that sees the coal assets wind up within the Peabody Energy business.

Some suspect that the portfolio could sell for about $2bn, but the dilemma for BHP is that it wants to distance itself from the commodity at a time when buyers are not paying up for coal assets despite the commodity price being at a high level and the fact that they are generating strong cashflow.

BHP is looking at a sale or a demerger of the assets as part of a commitment to diversify away from the coal industry, which is not seen in a favourable way by investors, worried about its impact on the environment.

Most banks will not fund thermal coal acquisitions despite the commodity price recently hitting record levels.

Peabody had earlier entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, although its Australian portfolio of coal assets was quarantined from the action.

Elliott, which has $US41.8bn ($55bn) worth of assets under management, has been closing in on Australian coal assets of late, buying a half share in the world’s largest mining services provider, Thiess, from CIMIC, which services the industry, and acquiring debt in Western Australia’s coal-fired Bluewaters Power Station.

On Wednesday, thermal coal hit $US132 a tonne – its highest level since 2010 – while the price of metallurgical coal rose 0.2 per cent to $US172 a tonne.