Source : THE AGE NEWS
A billionaire American mining financier, once known as “Toxic Bob” because of his environmental record, is nearly $124 million richer after US President Donald Trump backed a little-known Australian mining explorer with a $560 million loan.
The paper wealth of the colourful and wealthy American-Canadian mining identity Robert Friedland soared $124.5 million over a 1½-hour period on Australia’s stock exchange on Monday morning after Australian mining company Sunrise Energy Metals revealed details of the US government’s support for its Syerston Scandium Project in NSW.
Sunrise shares jumped 19 per cent, from $15.93 to peak at $19.63 before midday, increasing the value of Friedman’s holding to $660.63 million. The stock ended trading at $18.49, up 16 per cent, giving the company a market capitalisation around $3.1 billion.
That is a useful paper increase for Friedland, who built his estimated $US3.2 billion ($4.5 billion) fortune through helping to develop mines such as Rio Tinto’s gigantic Oyu Tolgoi copper field in Mongolia.
Friedland and Sunrise chief executive Sam Riggall were at a televised roundtable with Trump and numerous other mining executives at the US State Department on Friday when the president announced the Pentagon’s support of the miner’s venture, which the White House described as “the world’s first primary scandium mine”.
“Mr President, this is a truly historic occasion to bring America back to the leadership of mining,” Friedman said at the event. “We’re going to use Yankee ingenuity to prove that we can dominate the supply chain again, rather than have that used by other nations against us.”
Friedland is the chairman and biggest investor in Sunrise, joining the board in 2016.
The billionaire founded a company called Ivanhoe Mines, which owns major copper mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ivanhoe Capital, a Singapore-based investment firm with large holdings in Sunrise.
He reportedly was friends with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, spending time with Jobs at Reed College in Oregon and on an apple farm owned by Friedland’s uncle that gave some inspiration for the name of the tech entrepreneur’s company, Apple Inc.
Friedland’s early foray into mining was marred by scandal, earning him the “toxic” moniker. A US mine owned by the company of which he was chief executive leached sodium cyanide into a nearby river system, killing fish for miles downstream and requiring millions of dollars to clean up.
Some profiles of Friedland contrast the episode with his reputed role as the MC of the famous countercultural festival Woodstock, but that appears to have been born of confusion. Friedland had served on a charitable board with a hippie activist known as Wavy Gravy, who was the MC at the festival.
America, and other Western countries, are urgently diversifying their supply chains for rare earths to circumvent China’s stranglehold on many of the rare minerals that are key to critical defence technologies, electric vehicles and the clean energy transition.
Sunrise’s as-yet-unexploited patch of dirt near Fifield, south-west of Dubbo, contains one of the world’s largest and highest grade deposits of scandium, a rare metal largely produced by China, Russia and Ukraine, which is primarily used to strengthen the lightweight alloys used in high-performing fighter jets.
“The project hosts one of the largest and highest grade mineable scandium deposits within the Five Eyes jurisdiction and is being advanced as scalable, long-life and low-cost source of primary scandium outside [of] China,” the company said.
The US Department of War’s Office of Strategic Capital committed $US400 million ($560 million) in conditional loans to help develop the project.
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Simon Johanson is a business journalist at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
