For a person with an avowed dislike for change, it’s astonishing how much of it Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan (Venkat) has brought about at AngloGold Ashanti, a company he leaves after five years on August 31.
When he first eventually decided to take the job as CEO, the company consisted of 21 assets. It now comprises 13 – a process of elimination that pains him to remember. Each sale or closure was a wrench. He ticks them off one by one. TauTona, the closed South African mine; Obuasi, the Ghana mine on which his previous company, Ashanti Goldfields was largely predicated (happily to be reopened after re-engineering). He even regrets letting Cripple Creek & Victor “go”.
This is the US mine sold to Newmont Mining in 2015 for $820m. The transaction was actually a thing of beauty because it helped punch a massive hole in AngloGold’s debt and, more broadly, was the clearest signal at that time that gold resources of a certain ilk were actually pretty hard to find – which is why Newmont was prepared to pay so handsomely for it.
Speaking of his personal disposition, Venkat says: “It’s like the Jack Nicholson movie: ‘As good as it gets’. The same seat in the restaurant, the same type of food you order. I like to be rather unadventurous.” He is, of course, referring to the character Nicholson plays: the misanthrope and obsessive compulsive.
Well, that self-assessment is hard to compute in some respects. Venkat is, in fact, a philanthropist; not only for having in 2013 given up a portion of his salary in order to establish bursaries at the University of the Witwatersrand. He speaks in bright, tumbling, voluminous fashion.
“I’m a glass half full person,” he says later in the interview. Again, that’s tough to reconcile considering how he bounced back in 2015 following the rejection by shareholders of his proposal to demerge the South African business at a cost of $2.1bn, to be paid for by shareholders.
They didn’t like it and Venkat took the opportunity of that year’s Denver Gold Show presentation to reverse the decision.
But there was absolutely no chance of him “falling on his sword” as he describes it. “No, it wasn’t a case of knocking myself down. The concept was good,” he says. In fact, his response to the shareholder voice seems exactly the sort of opportunity-driven approach of which his new boss, Anil Agarwal, executive chairman of Vedanta, would be in high praise.
Any talk of Venkat’s next port of call as Vedanta CEO is forbidden. He won’t hear of it given he had a month as CEO of AngloGold still to run at the time of writing. In any event, who knows where Vedanta is heading given the link between Agarwal and Anglo American in which the Vedanta chairman has a personal 19%+ voting bloc. Suffice to say, the Indian firm is the type of challenge to which Venkat is likely to enjoy; he being so averse to change and all that!
Asked to look back, Venkat says he’s proud of having improved safety at AngloGold, but desperately disappointed not to have achieved 365 days fatality-free – so nearly an accomplishment. Mineworker safety and South African gold are hard to associate currently given the relatively high death rate this year. Venkat thinks something has to give.
He agrees what’s left of the South African gold industry has to embrace new shift arrangements, less staff, more focus on profitability and the co-operation of government and its institutions. “If we can’t come to that realisation, then all we are doing is cutting short the mine lives of gold.”
