ONCE upon a time CEOs of companies as grand as Anglo American migrated to a beachside villa or golfing redoubt when they retired. Not today. Take the list of investors stumping up $21m for shares in AIM-listed Zanaga Iron Ore Co (ZIOC).They include Tony Trahar and Mark Cutifani, who walked the corridors of 44 Main Street for a collective 17 years. Alongside their investment vehicle, Greymont Bay, is Mick Davis, the former CEO of Xstrata, a ZIOC investor in his own right. It was Davis who first spotted the potential of the Zanaga project, in the Republic of Congo (RoC).However, the project did not progress, mostly for market reasons. Glencore tickled the edges of the project following its $90bn merger with Xstrata in 2012, but didn’t take it forward. The plan now is for Greymont to buy Glencore’s 43% shareholding in ZIOC for $15m and then fire up the project, starting with the balance of the share placement.ZIOC’s head of corporate development is Andrew Trahar, son of Tony; he is also separately involved in business with Davis. The two co-founded Vision Blue, an investment firm building a graphite project in Madagascar. Other investors include Tony O’Neill, Anglo’s technical director, and ex-Rio Tinto executive Phil Mitchell, who like Trahar is also employed at ZIOC.Critical minerals come in all stripes these days. While copper is the metal of choice for its multiplicity of applications, iron ore can be just as important, said Trahar. Ore of a certain quality, when pelletised, can be supplied to electric arc furnace technology that slashes carbon emissions in the steel industry, the end user.Happily, the Zanaga project has this ore, which enables ZIOC to charge a premium to offset costs, so the investment case goes. The plan is to vertically integrate the project with downstream processing technology either in the RoC, which has in-country gas to power the plants, or in the Middle East, either in Saudi Arabia or one of the Gulf states.It’s no coincidence that Greymont Bay’s investment is conditional on 20% of the Zanaga project’s marketing rights being taken by Gulf Iron & Steel, described by ZIOC as “a consortium of strategic industry entities” interested in developing integrated steelmaking facilities in Asia and the Americas.“At this stage, there is no formal relationship with a Middle Eastern partner,” Trahar said in an interview last month. “We have an investor invested in downstream plants in the Middle East who see this as an opportunity.” He also acknowledges Cutifani’s previous business with the Saudi state-owned investment company Manara Minerals, which is a shareholder in Vale Base Metals, the Brazilian iron ore company of which Cutifani is chair.The Zanaga iron ore project will cost $2bn to build, a fraction of the $11.6bn a consortium including Rio Tinto is spending on Simandou, an iron ore project in Guinea. Simandou is 600km from a port; Zanaga 360km from Pointe-Noire in the RoC.Freight distances hike up both capex and opex, but Trahar said ZIOC can contain the initial outlay to $2bn, the project’s estimated capital as per a 2014 feasibility study. Xstrata didn’t enlist efficient, low-cost Chinese project developers that now proliferate in Africa. There is also certain self-help, such as installing a dry tailings facility and building a single pipeline for the project’s full intended capacity of 30Mt a year, which would reduce capex and opex by $2.7bn.DynastiesDynastic power runs deep in South Africa’s mining sector, though these days it operates in greener pastures. Sean Gilbertson, the son of former Gencor and Billiton CEO Brian Gilbertson, runs Gemfields, a UK-listed gemstones mining and marketing firm.In the US, TechMet is led by Brian Menell, brother of Rick, who was CEO of Avmin — both are second-generation heirs of the Anglovaal Group, built by the Hersov-Menell families. TechMet is a $1.2bn Dublin-headquartered critical minerals fund in which the Qatar Investment Authority and Swiss trader Mercuria are shareholders.Brian Menell has been circling the Dobra lithium project in Ukraine since 2023 and draws potential support from the Trump administration’s plan to extract minerals for peace. “It would certainly enhance our interest, and would create a framework that would justify doing more, bigger, quicker,” he told the Financial Times in March.TechMet’s investment partner in Dobra is Ronald Lauder, a billionaire friend of US President Donald Trump and a big advocate of US efforts to buy Greenland.The post The Jo’burg network behind Zanaga iron ore revival appeared first on Miningmx.
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