’Mentor’ Harvey backs Tinkler’s bid for north Queensland copper mine
Nathan Tinkler has tapped Gerry Harvey to bankroll his latest bid to return to the Australian resources sector.
Nathan Tinkler has tapped long-time friend and mentor Gerry Harvey to bankroll his latest bid to return to the Australian resources sector, with the retail billionaire backing a play for a Queensland copper mine.
Company documents filed with the Australian Securities & Investments Commission show Mr Tinkler’s Singapore-based Bentley Resources has taken on about $15m in debt from one of Mr Harvey’s private companies to help fund the July acquisition of the Lady Annie mine in north Queensland.
Lady Annie was owned by Hong Kong-listed CST, once a vehicle for mining entrepreneur Owen Hegarty, which paid $135m for the copper operation to Tony Sage’s Cape Lambert Resources in 2010.
Mounting losses at the mine left a window open for Mr Tinkler and Bentley to swoop on a new Australian mining deal and Lady Annie has returned to Australian hands in a complex deal involving Mr Tinkler and two Queensland mining equipment contractors, and partly bankrolled by retail king Gerry Harvey. Mr Tinkler is banned from acting as a director or manager of an Australian company until 2021 as the result of the liquidation of a suite of his personal corporate vehicles as the wheels fell off his business empire in 2016, and the extent of the former rich lister’s direct ownership stake in Lady Annie as a result of the deal are not clear from public documents.
But documents filed on the Hong Kong exchange by CST list Bentley as one of the mine’s buyers, along with unlisted Kombi Mining, “as trustee of the Lady Annie Trust”.
The pair paid $1 to close the acquisition, and assumed $22.7m worth of debt — a fraction of the $262.2m owed by CST’s Australian arm to its Hong Kong parent.
It is not clear who controls the Lady Annie Trust, which was established in February, just before CST first announced it had a deal to sell the mine.
But CST’s disclosure documents list Bentley Resources as the second purchaser, and a separate disclosure suggests Bentley may also have been acting as a trustee for the Lady Annie Trust.
Bentley was certainly involved in financing the acquisition, however.
Documents filed with ASIC show that Kombi Mining, owned by Queensland earthmoving and equipment hire businessman Shane O’Connell, borrowed $14.5m from Mr Harvey’s GH Finance and immediately on-loaned the cash to Mr Tinkler’s Bentley Resources as “part of the debt acquisition consideration”. Mr Harvey also confirmed Mr Tinkler’s direct involvement in acquisition. The pair have a long association, and Mr Tinkler has previously told The Australian he regards the retailing billionaire as a friend and mentor.
Mr Harvey lent $50m towards the Mr Tinkler’s buy-up of racing and breeding stock at Patinack Farm, where as much as $500m was spent in seven years until it went bust in 2014.
And the former mining magnate revealed to The Australian in January that loans from Mr Harvey were one of the factors that helped him satisfy creditors and annul his personal bankruptcy in 2017.
Mr Harvey told The Australian last week he was happy to be backing Mr Tinkler’s latest foray into the resources sector.
“I’ve been dealing with Nathan for 10 to 12 years and he was just in here yesterday. I’m hoping he’ll come good,” Mr Harvey said. “If it comes off it’ll be good, and if it works then I’ll be very happy.”
Mining at Lady Annie was halted by CST in the face of ongoing losses, and the operation is now on care and maintenance. To bring it back into production Kombi and Mr Tinkler have enlisted a new partner, mining equipment entrepreneur Dan Jauncey. Mr Jauncey cashed out his family business, Matilda Equipment, in an $80m deal with Emeco in mid-2018, and now owns 49 per cent of Lady Annie — and half of its debt.
Mr Jauncey told The Australian Mr Tinkler had acted as a consultant in his part of the deal, but said he wasn’t able to comment on the former rich-lister’s involvement in Kombi Mining.
He said he believed Lady Annie was a great opportunity, saying its new management was putting new equipment into the mothballed mine and beginning to ramp up production at the site, hoping to lift its 30-strong workforce to 80 in the coming months.
“I took a big cheque from selling Matilda and I should have retired, I guess, but I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I think this is just a great opportunity to take an asset that has been with foreign owners back into Australian hands and make a go of it.”
Mr Tinkler did not respond to a request for comment.