uranium king building castles in the sky in queensland
May 16th, 2006
Robert Friedland
Status: Chairman Ivanhoe Mines
Reputation: Specialises in high risk mining operations, Billed as “King of the Canadian Juniors” by his friends, “Toxic Bob” by environmentalists
Robert Friedland is a ’self-made’ billionaire, number 645 on the Forbes richest 400 Americans in 2006, with wealth close to $1.2 billion. Described as “arrogant, petulant, insulting” but also “intelligent”, “flamboyant”and “an evil genius” by his friend Doug Casey, Friedland’s colourful corporate career has included wild speculations, spectacular pollution scandals, shady deals with governments and military regimes and alleged links to mercenary groups. In 2003 he won the “Award For Mining’s Biggest Renegade” at the Dirty Digger Awards initiated by social justice watchdog by Mines and Communities.
Billed as “King of the Canadian Juniors” by stockbrokers, Freidland’s companies specialise in mining where others fear to tread: Military dictatorships, places of political instability or where mining is politically contentious. Friedland’s mining adventures have thus taken him to places like Burma and a partnership with the local military regime the the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC now called State Peace and Development Council (SPDC); Angola and Sierra Leone during 1980s civil uprising when mercenaries “Executive outcomes” were defending corporate interests there (even suggestions that one of Friedman’s companies, Branch Energy, owned the mercenary group); Papua New Guinea, where it is alleged he had connections to mercenary group Sandline International, isolated and poverty-stricken Mongolia, and now Australia during the current contentious uranium boom.
Friedland is remembered as a hippie in his youth, dealing drugs and tripping through India on money he allegedly misappropriated from his student union. According to Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch, Friedland was dubbed Toxic Bob “in 1969 when he was busted for trying to peddle 8,000 “hits” of the hallucinogenic drug LSD to an undercover drug agent in Portland, Maine” although it is generally attributed to his mining activities. He got his start in mining in the mid eighties with some fast talking and a loan from a relative eventually garnered him a joint venture with Rio Tinto Zinc to open up a gold mine in Nevada.
How Friedland attracts investors can be credited to his great showmanship, bullish predictions of profits and well placed friends. Outlandishly, his Oregon ventures were based on his clai that a Hindu god had told him there were rich deposits to be found there. His friend Doug Casey says, “He builds arguments and tells the story of his deals in such a compelling way that you feel like you have to own the stock.” Friedlands’ really big break came in 1994 in Newfoundland when his prediction that Voisey Bay was “the richest nickel, copper and cobalt deposit on the planet Earth” got investors very excited, boosting the stock from $4 to $167 a share in two years. Today he is saying similar things about mining prospects in Mongolia despite having produced no goods whatsoever, actually having spent millions on public projects to raise his profile with the locals.
His creativity in luring speculators took a fall in the early 1990s when his prediction for Venezuelan Goldfields, which made the biggest stock float ever at $31m, collapsed after public protest by local indigenous groups. In 1997 the Tasmanian government practically gave the Savage River iron mine to Freidland for a $13m ‘deferred’ payment, then changed the law to exempt them from responsibility for environmental damage the mine might cause. In 2006 Freidland is waxing lyrical about the potential size and profitability of a uranium deposit he alleges to have found in western Queensland, Australia – a speculation made all the more dubious in the face of a ban on uranium mining in that state and widespread local opposition.
Perhaps his most infamous business dealings involve the partnership his company Ivanhoe Myanmar Holdings and later Indochina Goldfields (renamed Ivanhoe Mines in 1999) forged with the Burmese regime SLORC. In 1994 SLORC and Ivanhoe began a lucrative joint venture in the Monywa copper mine, reputed to be the most profitable copper mine in the world. SLORC has a record of forcing labour on Burmese villagers, forcing workers to pay a part of their output to the state or taking their land in return for not forcing them to labour for the regime. This behaviour has led many multinational corporations, including Rio Tinto, to refuse to do business there. Mining Watch Canada say SLORC are being well supported by funds from Ivanhoe’s mining activities. With no environmental laws mining operations in Burma can be expected to be dirty, people downstream reported skin irritation from water discharged from the plant running bright blue with copper sulphate.
But his willingness to do dodgy deals with military autocrats and greedy governments notwithstanding, he has left a stunning trail of environmental wreckage behind him. He earned his nickname ‘Toxic Bob’ after a spectacular cyanide spill from his gold mine in Summitville, Colorado in 1993, which has been called the biggest cyanide disaster in U.S. History, named the ‘Exxon-Valdez’ of the mining industry. He avoided legal responsibility for that disaster by a timely resignation. Friedland tried to sue the USEPA and Justice Department for “damages for conspiracy, abuse of process, libel, breach of disclosure duties, loss of business opportunities and damage to reputation”, but failed. Friedland subsequently moved his assets out of the country, but reached a settlement with Friedland in 2000 for $27m, a fraction of the $150m needed to clean up the mess.
In 1995 the Omai gold mine holding pond collapsed, spewing 3.2 billion litres of cyanide-laced tailings into two rivers in Guyana, perhaps the biggest cyanide disaster in world history, for which no reparations have been made. The ‘independent’ report on the disaster denied the damage, saying,”no dead fish or animals were found”, despite news photographs and eyewitness accounts of hundred of dead fish, pigs and crocodiles. The Omai mine had been a joint venture with the World Bank, the Guyana government and Freidland’s South American Goldfields Inc. Once again a timely resignation saved Friedland from legal culpability.
The threat of similar incidents was one of the reasons people took to the streets against Ivanhoe Mines in April 2006 in Mongolia, burning an effigy of Friedman and camping in the capital for three weeks. The Ivanhoe Mine venture in Mongolia covers 82,000 sq/km, an area bigger than many countries, relatively untouched by industrial intervention. Even potential investors are a bit skittish on Mongolia, due to it’s isolation, lack of power, and the questionable quality of the mineral ores, according to Forbes magazine. As I write this, Ivanhoe’s fortunes in Mongolia look shaky, the Mongolian government imposing a heavy new ‘windfall tax’ to curb Friedland’s profits. In fact, Ivanhoe mines posted a loss of $23.2m in the first quarter of 2006. Let’s hope Friedlands’ karma is finally catching up with him.
Sense of Humour: in 2005 Friedland told an investor conference about his Mongolia prospect, “So we’re coming in from outer space and landing at Oyu Tolgoi in this version in the G5. And the nice thing about this, there’s no people around, the land is flat, there’s no tropical jungle, there’s no NGOs, we’re only 70 km from the Chinese border. It does not snow here. You’ve got lots of room for waste dumps without disrupting the populations and we are building the biggest new mine in the world.”
Sly cunning: “What he does - trying to find the diplomatic words for this here - he brings the movers and shakers and the decision-makers in the country to his table as partners before anything is discovered. For example, his partners in Indochina Goldfields in Burma would appear to be the Burmese Generals. Now he forms the partnerships with the Burmese Generals that run the country before he goes and, well should he be so lucky, discovers anything worthwhile” - John Woods, Canada Stockwatch talking to ABC’s Background Briefing 1997.
article written for New Internationalist magazine ‘Worldbeaters: Taking Aim at the Rich and Powerful’ -
References:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation., 1997. “Robert Friedland: The King of the Canadian Juniors” on Radio National, Background Briefing broadcast Sunday, April 6. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s10601.htm
Burton, B. 1997. “Toxic Bob buys Savage River” Mining Monitor, MPI Newsletter, June.
http://users.nlc.net.au/mpi/mm/editions/mining_monitor_vol2no2pp1-6.pdf
Casey, D 2003. “Doug Casey Looks At Mongolia” http://www.escapeartist.com/OREQ6/Mongolia.html
Chaterjee, P. 1996. “Investor Beats Mining Disaster charges” in Albion Monitor, December 11.
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/9612a/friedland.html
Chaterjee, P. 1998. “The Man with the Midas Touch” Project Underground at http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/motherlode/gold/fried.html
Distelhorst, L. 2006. “Civil Movements Burn Effigies, Start Hunger Strike” in The UB Post, April 20.
http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/mining.php?subaction=showfull&id=1145498400&archive=&start_from=&ucat=37&
Ivanhoe Mines 2006. http://www.ivanhoe-mines.com
Jodah, D.K. 1995. “Courting Disaster in Guyana” in Multinational Monitor, November.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/mm1195.04.html
Forbes.com “#645 Robert Friedland” http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/QXNL.html Friedland, R 2005. “Nothing Like it on Planet Earth - Robert Friedland’s Tour d’ Tolgoi”address delivered at the BMO Nesbitt Burns 2005 Global Resources Conference, Tampa, Fla. in Resource Investor http://www.resourceinvestor.com/pebble.asp?relid=9010
Moody, R 1994 “The Ugly Canadian: Robert Freidland and the Poisoning of the Americas” in Multinational Monitor, http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994/11/mm1194_08.html
Moody, R. 1997. “Grave Diggers: A Report on Mining in Burma” Mining Watch Canada http://www.miningwatch.ca/updir/Grave_Diggers.pdf
Roberts, J. 1995. “Eyewitnesses Report on Rainforest Cyanide Disaster” in Albion Monitor, September 18. http://albionmonitor.net////9-18-95/eyewitness.html
Williams, M. 1995. “Summitville Mine Disaster” Department of Geography, University of Colorado.
http://snobear.colorado.edu/Markw/Intro/Summitville/summitville.html
Categories: environment | Tags: mining, queensland, uranium
