Legendary prospector Mark Creasy the kingmaker in tussle between Rinehart and SQM for Azure

Mark Creasy made his first fortune in gold, his second in nickel. Lithium is about to deliver his third.

Gina Rinehart might have grabbed the late headlines through her latest intervention in a lithium takeover, but the position held by legendary West Australian prospector Mark Creasy in Azure Minerals is equally worthy of noting.

Creasy will be a kingmaker in the deal, holding 13.2 per cent of the company’s stock. He is yet to make a call on whether he will sell to SQM or Mrs Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting – though it is worth noting that his wife, Annie Guo, sits on the company’s board that supported the SQM offer.

But, more importantly, Creasy holds 40 per cent of the Andover deposit, which underlies SQM’s takeover bid for Azure. Hancock’s strategy on both Liontown Resources and Azure still has market watchers scratching their heads.

Hancock dropped $1.6bn buying Liontown shares to spoil Albemarle’s bid for the company, and has since seen their value slashed by the US giant’s decision to walk away – value that seems unlikely to be recovered anytime soon given falling lithium prices and the inevitable selling that falls on any company in the middle of building a complex project.

With a lazy $20bn or so in cash floating around, Hancock won’t be too worried in the short term – but the thinking behind the decision remains puzzling, given Hancock usually doesn’t splash cash without a clear purpose.

Gina Rinehart.

SQM’s structure of its bid for Azure is clearly designed to avoid the same fate as Albemarle. If Hancock hits a 19 per cent holding the scheme of arrangement falls away, and defaults to an on-market takeover offer. That offers a guaranteed return to small Azure shareholders, without the risk of getting caught in a standoff between Hancock and Albemarle.

But that makes Hancock’s decision to head to the market even more puzzling, particularly when such a big portion of the project is sitting inside the Creasy Group.

Surely the easiest way to lock down Andover would be to make a direct cash offer to Creasy. In time, that is what SQM will have to do anyway.

Whichever way he jumps, Creasy remains the kingmaker in any fight for control of Azure.

And while Creasy keeps the lowest profile of any of the WA mining billionaires, any deal for Azure will deliver him an achievement few others can match.

Creasy made his first pile by selling the Bronzewing gold discovery to Joseph Gutnick’s Great Central Mines in the 1990s, in a package ultimately worth about $170m.

His second fortune came with the sale of his share of the Nova nickel deposit to IGO, in the 2015 takeover of Sirius Resources, which delivered the Creasy Group a package worth about $660m.

On SQM’s valuation of Azure, Creasy’s stake in Andover is worth about $1.1bn.

How many people in the industry can legitimately claim the same bragging rights?

Three discoveries sold over three decades, in three different commodities, for three different fortunes – that is truly the stuff of legend.