Dead, buried and cremated

THE Wesfarmers offer – vague try-on for reasons buried deep inside the brain of CEO Rob Scott – for Aussie-Malaysian rare earth group Lynas is, in the famous words of former PM Tony Abbott, “dead, buried and cremated”.

That’s, importantly, Aussie as-in the stuff is mined in WA; Malaysian asin the stuff is processed over there and where the lowlevel radioactive waste material is left.

In the process, it joins a lot of other supposedly recyclable crap like plastics and paper from our – at least, virtue-signalling – ‘green’ lifestyle that we end up ‘recycling’ by ‘exporting’ to developing countries.

The two-country dynamic is important, because the Wesfarmers play was in fact all three of those things – dead, buried, cremated – even before its disclosure in March.

The offer was conditional on Lynas ‘clearing up’ its Malaysian mess – not so much the actual waste, but its ability to keep operating there.

And if and when Lynas did that, the Wesfarmers supposed offer price was always going to be ludicrously low. So it was dead on delivery, by choice

This has been shown by what’s happened. Malaysia’s (very wily) PM Mahathir Mohamad indicated recently that Lynas would be able to continue – and its share price rocketed well above the Wesfarmers indicated $2.25. Even after yesterday it was still well above at $2.88.

If Wesfarmers wants Lynas it going to have to FIRST pay up big and THEN punt on Malaysia and Mohammed never backtracking.