From salt mines to J-Lo’s table, the rise of Rio’s new boss; The high cost of coping with Clive

A younger and much more youthful Simon Trott in his days running Rio’s salt, uranium and borates facilities. Picture: Aaron Francis

From a wheat farm to FIFO work, leading Rio Tinto’s defence against a BHP merger, salt mines and a brush with J-Lo, and then rescuing Rio’s iron ore division from its own mistakes – it’s been quite the ride for incoming Rio Tinto boss Simon Trott.

The affable West Australian has had a solid preparation for the whiplash that comes from running the massive mining company.

He’s arguably the first Rio boss to have worked a fly-in, fly-out role with the company – Leigh Clifford spent six years as a mining engineer in Broken Hill, and Tom Albanese spent plenty of time standing over remote drilling rigs in the US, but neither are quite the same.

And, with stints running salt, uranium, borate, diamond, lithium and iron ore projects – in far-flung regions including Namibia, the US, Canada and Serbia (less said the better, though), Trott probably has the broadest experience of its long list of chief executives.

There’s even been a fleeting brush with Hollywood fame, we’re told.

Hollywood A-lister Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez. Picture: Getty Images

Earlier last decade, when he was in charge of Rio’s miscellaneous “minerals” business – primarily salt, borate and diamonds – he was on a sales mission deep in western China. The profit margins in the salt business are wafer thin and every dollar counted. Trott was put up in a basic local hotel.

The next day Trott had to fly out to look after the glamour side of his business: diamonds. Within 24 hours of leaving the ramshackle hotel in China he was sitting in Las Vegas sharing a table with pop star Jennifer Lopez.

Margin Call, sadly, doesn’t know what was discussed on the night – we’re hoping it was the relative merits of Lopez’s film catalogue, rather than the minutiae of mine engineering.

Still, a brush with J-Lo, however fleeting, probably brings Trott slightly closer to the interests of the company’s workers than Sam Walsh’s collection of antique milk jugs.

But we’d imagine Walsh is probably having a rueful smile at the Rio board’s return to form in its swift dismissal of Jakob Stausholm from the top job.

Sam Walsh’s time leading Rio Tinto also came to an abrupt end.

Trott has ascended to Rio’s top job within two months of the company announcing the shock departure of Stausholm, a brutally fast transition.

Walsh, also, was tasked with the job of rescuing the company from the mistakes of a pre­decessor, taking over after Tom Albanese copped a bullet over the Alcan disaster. Walsh, like Stausholm, was given short shrift when the rescue job was complete.

Although the then Rio board tried to cling on to Walsh’s own successor, Jean-Sebastien Jacques, even after the scale of the ­Juukan Gorge debacle became clear, the current crop of directors have come full circle again.

Government’s big bills

When there’s $300bn on the line in a lawsuit, you can probably forgive the federal government for spending a bit of money defending its position.

But the $13.7m so far spent defending itself against Clive Palmer’s epic $300bn lawsuit against the country is still a big number – particularly given that most informed spectators rate Palmer’s chances of winning the $300bn jackpot at somewhere between none and Buckley’s.

As with most of Palmer’s legal cases, though, it’s been a wild ride for the federal government – fundamentally in the gun for the massive lawsuit because the West Australian state government, back in 2012, refused to approve the development of Palmer’s ­Balmoral South Iron Ore mine.

Palmer launched the suit in the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague in 2023, after shifting the ultimate ownership of his flagship mining company, Mineralogy, to Singapore to allow him to access investor-state clauses in Australia’s free-trade treaties in ASEAN.

Since then it’s been quite the experience for the federal government’s staid lawyers, caught between a budget-busting lawsuit and Palmer’s traditionally chaotic approach to litigation.

The details are included in a previously unreported submission to the PCA earlier this year, in which the federal government outlines its costs defending the matter, and blames Palmer for most of them.

Clive Palmer’s $300bn legal claim against the country has led to some big legal bills for the federal government. Picture: Getty Images

Included in the $13.7m is $2m spent by the WA government, as well as legal counsel, $300,000 in travel costs, and $3.1m in paying expert witnesses – the testimony of most, as the Attorney-General’s general counsel for international law, Jesse Clarke, testily outlined in the submission, weren’t even used because Palmer kept changing his story.

“The claimant has constantly ‘changed its story’, raising and then abandoning various factual and legal contentions, and providing inconsistent and unspecified accounts on numerous issues central to jurisdiction and admissibility,” the submission says.

Those include an argument that Mineralogy shifted its ownership for tax reasons, because it was exploring for lithium in New Zealand, as well as multiple versions of its reasons for being owned out of Singapore.

Then there were delays caused by Palmer’s decision to hire former federal Attorney-General Christian Porter to his legal team. That eventually foundered, the submission says, not because of the clear conflict of interest involved in his participation on Palmer’s legal team – but because Porter, bizarrely, also put in a witness statement on Palmer’s behalf.

On top of that came Palmer’s decision to withdraw most of his own expert witnesses just ahead of last year’s hearings at the PCA – after, according to Clarke, the federal government had prepared its cross-examination of them.

As for Palmer? His submissions claimed the Queensland businessman spent some €7.9m ($14.1m) on his own case. Again, probably not unreasonable given the scale of the claim.

But it does make you wonder why Palmer then decided to ditch his high-powered briefs and present the entire case to the tribunal himself.

That makes Palmer probably the first Australian to represent himself both in front of the High Court and The Hague, for what that’s worth.

Palmer, generously, has since dropped his own claim for costs. Easy enough to do, though, if you’re convinced you’re on a $300bn winner.

Margin Call hears that both sides expect a decision in September or October.

But the costs will probably keep coming for both sides, given Palmer has another three claims against Australia in the PCA – all over his failure to win coal exploration and mining permits in Queensland.