Regent back to lead Niobec purchase

MONTREAL — Two years after being sacked as Barrick Gold Corp.’s chief executive for failing to ignite its share price, Aaron Regent is back in the mining game with a half-billion dollar deal he calls the “first of many.”

Regent’s private equitybacked Magris Resources Inc. is teaming up with some deeppocketed Asian investors to buy Iamgold Corp.’s Niobec mine in Quebec for $500 million in cash. The buyers have agreed to pay another $30 million for a nearby rare earth element deposit when it goes into production.

The market has been rife with speculation about Regent’s deal- making following his 2012 termination at Barrick, which let him go after a threeyear tenure despite the fact the company’s share price did not lag those of its rivals.

For nearly every asset rumoured to be on the market, Regent’s name popped up as a potential buyer.

He was linked to a group working on a bid for Glencore Xstrata’s Las Bambas copper mine in Peru. And he was said to have made an approach for Freeport-McMoRan Inc.’s Candelaria copper mine in Chile.

This is his first acquisition since founding Toronto-based Magris in early 2013.

The financial backers are Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings and CEF Holdings Ltd., a Hong-Kong investment firm owned by billionaire Li Ka- shing’s Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd. and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

Magris is also tapping a term loan from National Bank of Canada and Bank of Nova Scotia to help finance the transaction.

Closely held Magris is opportunistic and won’t restrict itself in terms of the geographies and asset types in which it will invest, Regent said.

Still, Magris has a bias toward buying assets located in the Americas and for base metals (copper, nickel and zinc, among others) or industrials over precious metals, he said.

Proceeds of the sale, when combined with the company’s current cash and cash equivalents as well as the market value of its gold holdings, brings its liquid assets to more than $800 million, Iamgold said.

The miner plans to use the money for acquisitions or to reduce debt.