Northam gets shot in arm
• Powerful board, chaired by Mosehla, includes the former heads of major platinum groups
Northam Platinum’s board has received an injection of fresh blood, with the departure of chairman Lazarus Zim after a decade in the position, and the inclusion of former Impala Platinum CE David Brown as a nonexecutive director.
Northam Platinum’s board has received an injection of fresh blood, with the departure of chairman Lazarus Zim after a decade in the position, and the inclusion of former Impala Platinum CE David Brown as a nonexecutive director to steer the investment committee.
Northam has a powerful board including the former heads of major platinum groups. It is chaired by Brian Mosehla, a merchant banker who has been with Northam since August 2015 and represents the JSE-listed empowerment vehicle Zambezi Platinum, the holder of 31.4% of the JSE-listed miner.
Brown, CE of Coal of Africa, returns to platinum as a nonexecutive director and chairman of Northam’s investment committee, which looks for opportunities to grow the platinum miner. It has already concluded four company-changing deals.
Brown said his time at Coal of Africa had given him useful experience in deal making and assessing assets, not to mention his time as CE and chief financial officer of Impala Platinum (Implats), the world’s secondlargest platinum miner.
Platinum miners are focusing on shallow deposits that can be mechanically mined for the lowest possible cost.
Brown shares the board with John Smithies, his predecessor at Implats and a 20-year veteran with the company, and Ralph Havenstein, a former CE of Anglo American Platinum.
It will almost be an old-boys club heading up Northam, with former Implats employee Paul Dunne rising to be the executive head of its mining, concentrating and smelting operations at its Rustenburg mines.
Zim, a former CE of Anglo American SA, had a difficult 10 years with Northam, with his investment vehicle Afripalm forced to sell its empowerment shares in the company after the empowerment transaction that brought him to the Northam board collapsed.
In an interview, Zim said he fought his corner when faced with calls to leave Northam, arguing that he, along with Tokyo Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda Resources had brought the undeveloped deposit at Booysendal to the company and he had a right to be on the board.
“That was a very serious setback for all of us in the empowerment deal and me personally. By 2012, the commodity crash of 2008 caught up with us. We were forced sellers. It left me in a position for three years where I was on the board, but without a shareholding,” Zim said.
“It really wasn’t pleasant on the board. There were those who wanted me to leave, but they overlooked the fact that the asset that changed this company was brought in by me … this was the fruit of my labour and I said I’d stick around as unpleasant as it was on the board,” he said.
“There were certain shareholders and board members who felt because the empowerment deal had failed I must just disappear, but others on the board supported me,” he said.
Zim and his family now indirectly hold 3.5% of Northam through their stake in Zambezi.
Dunne, who joined Northam in 2014, agreed with Zim on the need for innovative thinking about an empowerment structure that was not open to the vagaries of share price fluctuations and debt covenants that sank the original empowerment deal, threatening Northam’s mining rights.
Booysendal was the first critical step in Northam diversifying away from a single, deep-level platinum mine at Zondereinde, bringing a large, shallow deposit with 100-million ounces metal in the ground.
Zim said that he opted to step off the Northam board to make way for fresh thinking, having known Mosehla for 22 years, and to focus on his business studies in the US where some of his family live.