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Gold/Mining/Energy : SOUTH AFRICAN MINING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (357)	2/4/1999 8:09:00 PM
From: .Trev	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 472

Right to the heart of the matter as usual! What I can't understand is why Placer would put themselves into partnership with such a guyeven for high class rserves. You obviously couldn't trust him to be operator, but it's going to be a reach for PDG alsoand they're wide open to being fooled by local conditions and relationships. I'm not so snguine about their deal making as I used to be. Thanks for the E bu the way@

To: sea_urchin who wrote (357)	2/5/1999 1:40:00 PM
From: Ptaskmaster	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 472

Placer Dome bought 50% of a blue chip gold reserve with its investment in Western Areas, but the money from the buy-in likely won't be used to develop the mine. So the hole in the ground that looked from overseas like a mine is on closer inspection a Black Hole down which PDG will have to pour cash?

To: sea_urchin who wrote (357)	2/7/1999 12:34:00 AM
From: POLARBEAR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 472

Another point of view.... August 23, 1996 BRETT KEBBLE A Barnato for the Nineties Commercial director Brett Kebble personifies the change at Randgold even more so than cool, trim chairman Peter Flack. Randgold has reported the best quarterly results of the individual gold mining houses (Fox August 2), having recently acquired four mines previously in the Gengold stable. Flack (48) made his name as a turnaround artist at Fraser Alexander. Kebble, in common with Flack, is also a lawyer but, unlike him, has had little hands-on management experience. Kebble is only 32 and is not exactly an old-school-tie type. Yet it is Kebble who is credited with having been the deal-making force behind events that led to the mid-1994 shareholders' revolt in the gold rump of what was once the most powerful mining combine in the world, Rand Mines. No wonder people are calling him the new Barney Barnato. Indeed, in two years the new brooms -- apart from Flack and Kebble, Kebble's mining engineer father, Roger, and former Anglo executive Lionel Hewitt -- have added almost R1bn to Randgold's 1994 market capitalisation of R200m. Kebble may be the youngest by far of the four but he is a stranger to neither financial engineering nor to mining. In the late Eighties, having matriculated at St Andrews in Bloemfontein and obtained a BA LLB from UCT, he built a successful practice advising offshore investors in SA, first at top-drawer Cape Town firm Mallinicks and later at his own firm, Kebble & Cornwall. He grew up in mining communities because his father spent most of his career in the employ of Anglo before starting his own contracting business in 1976. "By the time I was in law, my father had retired. But he was so bored that when we were approached by Rand Leases, he jumped at the opportunity. This was when we began to believe there were other opportunities in mining." One was that Rand Mines' ailing Durban Deep shared a common boundary with Rand Leases. "We knew that Durban Deep was going to hit the wall because of the way it was being managed. So we approached Rand Mines and made it an offer for Durban Deep." Not surprisingly, the upstart Kebbles were shown the door. However, when they discovered Randgold was going to be unbundled out of Rand Mines and separately listed, an opportunity was presented to the father-and-son team. "Along with members of our consortium -- by then led by Flack -- we started buying Randgold shares, only to discover that we were bidding against people like (London's) Julian Baring of Mercury Asset Management." When Baring fought shy of increasing his stake, because of bad results from Randgold's ERPM, and when Rand Mines' parent Barlow Rand decided to offload its stake, the way was clear for the consortium to throw its weight behind the transaction. After three months of frenetic activity in mid-1994, the change of control took place in August. Kebble reflects that what had happened at Randgold "was the assets were no longer able to rise above the management." Mildly disdainfully, he adds that SA institutions "tend to want the safety of many years of tradition, even if this means listening to incompetent managers instead of examining results. "What we didn't know, for instance, was the value that had been built up outside of SA by the exploration side's Mark Bristow and his able team of geologists. After all, the previous management had actually threatened to close down the exploration side -- which would have been similar to taking out someone's heart." Bristow, one of four executive directors who were part of the Old Guard, says: "I'd always felt that Randgold needed to grow -- here and elsewhere -- and it has been wonderful to be supported in this vision by Brett. He has a fertile brain, is deeply involved in strategic issues and has a clear but fair negotiating style." Kebble confirms that in the broad sense he has been Randgold's dealmaker. "But I've always believed that the way to destroy people is to put them in boxes. Part of our success is we work as partners, slot in for one another when necessary and communicate well." Comments Flack: "Brett is clever and innovative and he has an enormous capacity for work. He's also wonderfully warm and rounded in the sense of having interests ranging from wine to historical battlefields and is a pianist of concert hall standard. He has a lovely sense of humour and knows exactly when to defuse tension." Kebble says the challenges for the future can be summed up in one word -- gold. "I believe it's underrated as a simple commodity -- particularly in the light of demand from the East. Though we succeeded with diamonds, I think our industry has failed in the promotion of gold -- and this is something to address." Roger Kebble jokes that he used to be referred to as "Guy's father" -- Guy Kebble is the rugby commentator and former Springbok prop forward -- but now he is referred to as "Brett's junior partner." Brett Kebble used to play provincial tennis but today has little time for anything but his family -- wife Ingrid and three children, a son aged four, a son aged three and a one-year-old daughter -- and Randgold.