[miningmx.com] – RESOURCE Generation (Resgen) CEO, Paul Jury, and chairman Brian Warner were removed at a general meeting held in Sydney this morning as shareholders Noble Resources and Altius Investment Holdings installed a new board of directors at the ASX and JSE-listed coal junior.
Six new directors were appointed of which four are South African – Rob Croll, Lulamile Xate, Leapeetswe (Papi) Molotsane and Konji Sebati. Two Australian directors – Denis Gately and Colin Gilligan – were appointed.
Croll is well known in South African mining circles having held senior management positions at De Beers, Anglo American and AngloGold Ashanti. He’s currently a principal consultant with the MSA group.
Molotsane is a former CEO of Telkom while Sebati is a former ambassador to Switzerland and France and is currently CEO of IPASA (The Innovative Pharmaceutical Association South Africa). Xate is a former Robben Island veteran and a founding member and director of Altius.
The new chairman and CEO of Resgen have not yet been announced.
The confrontation between Noble/Altius and the former Resgen board become public in mid-September and was triggered by Resgen’s problems in raising the outstanding $400m required to build its proposed Boikarabelo coal mine the Waterberg region of South Africa.
Noble is an anchor shareholder in Resgen as well as a strategic partner having put up a $68m loan facility as well as an additional $55m loan to pay for construction of a feeder rail link from the mine to the main Transnet railway out of the Waterberg.
Noble is also the supply chain manager and exclusive marketing agent and has signed an off-take contract to buy an initial 3mt/year of coal for the first eight years of production.
Jury vehemently opposed the proposed board changes and Resgen appealed to the Australian Takeovers Panel for “… a declaration of unacceptable circumstances’ claiming – amongst other things – that Noble and Altius were associates and failed to disclose this association.
The Panel ruled on November 19 that Noble and Altius had failed to disclose their association and ordered that the two now disclose this association but, crucially, took no further action.
Instead the panel ruled that it “… did not consider that it had been provided with sufficient evidence of a voting agreement to make a finding that Noble and Altius had acquired a relevant interest in each other’s Resource Generation shares that would result in a contravention of s606.”
The Resgen board immediately took the panel’s decision on review, but failed to win any further concessions.
A release published by the Takeovers Panel published on November 24 stated, according to the release, “… the Panel considered that there was no reasonable likelihood that it would make any finding more favourable to the applicant that was made by the initial panel and declined to conduct proceedings. As the panel has declined to conduct proceedings it has made no interim orders.”
That scuppered Jury’s last ditch attempt to get today’s general meeting either scrapped or postponed so averting his ouster.
