Graham Briggs

THE burning question for Graham Briggs since he took on troubled junior miner Copper 360 at the age of 72 is this – what was he thinking? Briggs retired from Harmony Gold in 2015 when he was 62 after spending seven years as CEO. Presumably he was on a good financial wicket and retired with the kind of financial benefits most of us can only salivate over. Usually executives in that position take on a few independent directorships, mainly to alleviate the boredom of retirement as they don’t really need the money.

But Briggs has instead signed on full-time to try to rescue an embattled junior which has horribly underperformed the production forecasts of the previous management and finds itself in a treacherous financial position. The main reason for that is the mining operations ran into trouble. Sounds like a job for an innovative mining engineer and/or a financial whizzkid, only that Briggs is a geologist by training. His greatest contribution at Harmony Gold was in championing the group’s exposure to the Hidden Valley and Wafi-Golpu projects in Papua New Guinea.

Rather than digging for minerals, Briggs presided over a R1.5bn financial rescue package for Copper 360 that included a huge issue of capital at 50 South African cents a share. The market was not impressed, hence the meltdown in the share price by the time Briggs was appointed. Who really needs this aggro in retirement?