Barrick boss jumps to rival
Toronto miner’s president praised as ‘relationship-builder’ in 16 years at firm
Barrick Gold Corp. announced Monday that its president Kelvin Dushnisky will depart in August, pushing down the shares of the world’s largest gold company and opening the door to speculation about his successor.
Dushnisky will relocate from Toronto to Johannesburg, where he will join AngloGold Ashanti Ltd. as chief executive officer. The jump to AngloGold, the third-largest, allows Dushnisky to finally ascend to the helm of a major gold company.
Barrick ended the day at $15.54, down 4.25 per cent, in Toronto. The shares have dropped 13 per cent this year as gold futures declined 6.4 per cent in New York.
While at Barrick, for 16 years, Dushnisky, 54, rose through the ranks, joining the board of directors and becoming a president in 2015. But because the company has no chief executive, Dushnisky always laboured under the shadow of the executive chairman John L. Thornton, who joined the company from Goldman Sachs in 2012.
“Kelvin is very influential and Kelvin knows the company very well, but he never was kind of in the CEO role,” said Jim Gowans, who served as co-president with Dushnisky at Barrick before departing in 2016, adding that at AngloGold, he will have “both hands on the tiller.”
Gowans, now president and chief executive of Arizona Mining Inc., praised Dushnisky as a “relationship-builder,” who uses his training as a lawyer — he was a former general counsel prior to joining Barrick in 2002 — and diplomacy to form bonds with government leaders.
“This gives him that opportunity to make his mark in the areas that he’s good at,” said Gowans.
Dushnisky, who begins at Johannesburg-based AngloGold in September, was not available for comment, but in a press release thanked Thornton and the board of directors for their “confidence.” He will replace Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan, who in April accepted a position as chief executive of Vedanta Resources Ltd, a diversified mining firm based in India.
Pierre Lassonde, chairman of Franco-Nevada Corp., which has a royalty agreement with Barrick, said Dushnisky is well-suited to taking on a lead role at AngloGold. “I think his role at Barrick was Mr. Fixer,” said Lassonde.
Toronto-based Barrick, which announces its second quarter earnings on Wednesday, said it will replace Dushnisky “in due course.”
Michael Faralla, head of global mining at TD Securities Inc., expects Barrick will continue its tradition of trying to find a new leader from within its ranks. “I don’t necessarily think they’ll have a huge challenge replacing him internally,” he told Bloomberg News. “They have strong bench strength.”
One likely front-runner is Catherine Raw, the miner’s chief financial officer. Hand-picked by Thornton, Raw joined Barrick in 2015 from BlackRock International Ltd., where she had worked as a portfolio manager. In the past year, she has taken on a more public role at Barrick, speaking at industry conferences and to the press.
Raw studied geophysics at Cambridge and mining finance at Imperial College London. Her biggest handicaps might be her age — she is 37 — and relatively fewer years of operational mining experience.
Kevin Thomson might also make sense, given the company’s shifting focus toward its Nevada assets. Thomson, a lawyer, has been senior executive vice-president of strategic matters for Barrick since 2014.
Another possible internal candidate is chief investment officer Mark Hill, Credit Suisse Group AG analyst Anita Soni said in a note.
Barrick, which produced 5.32 million ounces of gold and 432 million pounds of copper in 2017, has mines in North and South America, Africa, Australia and Papua New Guinea.
During the past three years, under Dushnisky’s tenure as president, the company helped reduce around $13 billion in debt to its present $6 billion in debt — 75 per cent of which is due after 2030. In April, the company announced it will pivot away from its practice of selling assets to reduce debt.
He is also chairman of Acacia Mining Inc, a majority-owned Barrick subsidiary that has been locked in a tax dispute with the government of Tanzania. It was not clear if he would retain that title after his departure.
As gold producers, both Barrick and AngloGold face similar problems, including a gold price that is flagging below US$1,300 for the first time all year, political standoffs and an ever-present need to replenish gold reserves with new discoveries.
Johannesburg-based AngloGold has diversified in recent years, moving more and more of its production out of South Africa, and expanding into other parts of Africa, Australia and South America.