Hungarian immigrant Peter Munk built world’s largest gold empire
TORONTO — Barrick Gold Corp.’s visionary founder Peter Munk, a man of lofty global ambitions who fulfilled them like few others, died Wednesday at the age of 90.
He racked up an impressive series of accomplishments in everything from custom stereos to tropical resorts, and established himself as one of Canada’s great entrepreneurs.
Munk will always be most renowned, however, as the founder and builder of one of the world’s largest gold mining empires while at the helm of Barrick Gold. It was there where he most displayed his willingness to take risks, spot overlooked opportunities and challenge the status quo.
He was born in Budapest in 1927 and fled Hungary with his family in 1944 when Nazi Germany invaded. He arrived in Toronto in 1948 at age 20 and undertook a number of entrepreneurial business activities before founding Barrick in 1983.
“This is a country that does not ask about your origins, but concerns itself with your destiny,” Munk said in 2011. He is survived by Melanie, his wife of 45 years; five children, Anthony, Nina, Marc-David, Natalie, and Cheyne; and 14 grandchildren.
Munk, whose cause of death was not disclosed, leaves a legacy of business success, charitable donations, and as an outspoken defender of the benefits of capitalism.
Toronto-based Barrick Gold grew into one of the world’s biggest gold producers under Munk’s leadership.
“When I joined Barrick in 2002, the company was in the news on an almost daily basis,” said Barrick president Kelvin Dushnisky.
“Words like innovative, entrepreneurial, instinctive, agile and astute were used regularly to describe the company. They could just as easily have been talking about Peter Munk himself, and, in many ways they were. Barrick is, after all, an extension of Peter’s personality.” Starting in 1983 with a small Ontario underground mine producing 3,000 ounces of gold a year, Munk set Barrick on a path of exponential growth. The company’s biggest break came in 1986, when he bought an underperforming mine in Nevada called Goldstrike. Few saw the potential of the mine, then producing 40,000 ounces of gold a year, but Munk made a bet on it and struck it big.
Before long, the mine was producing over two million ounces a year and remains one of the company’s core mines, producing over a million ounces a year.
Not one satisfied to settle on a tidy profit, Munk would continue to buy mines and take over companies. By 2006, Barrick was the world’s biggest gold producer, after gobbling up miner Placer Dome for $10.4 billion US.
Munk was able to continue to grow Barrick in part because he was an outsider to the mining world and approached it from a financial perspective, bringing in innovate hedging programs and financial discipline.
His continuous push for growth, however, also led him to trouble. Multi-billion-dollar bets on Zambian copper and a megamine in the Andes at the height of the recent commodity boom weighed heavily on the company, and threatened to tarnish Munk’s legacy at Barrick.
And as the company’s mining empire expanded, so too did the social criticism, with accusations of abuse at mines in Papua New Guinea and Tanzania drawing protests and reprimands.
But Munk was unapologetic, and held fast in his convictions that the company was overall a source of good as part of a globalized world of capitalism.