Glencore founder to scoop another £90m
GLENCORE’S boss will bag a £90m pay-out tomorrow as the mining group dishes out the second half of a dividend.
Ivan Glasenberg, 61, owns an 8.5pc stake in Glencore after he and other bosses snapped up shares in 2015 to pour cash into the firm and help it reduce debt.
His stake is worth more than £4bn with shares having risen almost 400pc since lows of around 73p in 2016 to 341p.
The Swiss village where Glasenberg lives has slashed taxes from residents because of the huge sums it earns from the mining tycoon.
He and other shareholders will be getting a pay-out of around 7.64p tomorrow, having received the first half of the payment in May.
Head of zinc Daniel Francisco Mate Badenes, 55, and director Telis Mistakidis, 56, who each own around 3.2pc of the firm according to Reuters data, should get around £34m each.
yesterday the commodities trader and miner also announced plans on Tuesday to buy back a further $1bn (£759bn) in shares.
It has already bought back $1bn worth since July in an apparent bid to shore up the share price that has fallen amid a corruption probe.
Glencore’s stock suffered its biggest one day fall in more than two years in July as the business revealed it had received a subpoena from the US Department of Justice demanding documents about the mining firm’s business in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Venezuela and Nigeria.
Glencore relies on the DRC as a source of cobalt, a key metal used to make batteries for electric vehicles. But the area is fraught with difficulties. The US has slapped sanctions on Glencore’s former mining partner there Dan Gertler, accusing him of getting sweetheart mining deals out of DRC president Joseph Kabila. Glencore has had to agree to pay his outstanding royalties in euros rather than dollars to avoid US sanctions. Chairman Tony Hayward, as well as board members Leonhard Fischer and Patrice Merrin, are overseeing Glencore’s response to the US investigation.
Separately last week, a High Court judge told Glencore’s lawyers to hand over documents to a Bloomberg journalist, who was covering a commercial dispute at the court between the mining group and Peruvian rival. Glencore’s solicitor refused to hand Kaye Wiggins a copy of a written ‘skeleton argument’. The reporter raised the matter with Mrs Justice Moulder.
Glencore’s lawyer said he had instructions ‘not voluntarily to do anything to publicise the matter, but if your Ladyship were to direct us we would certainly do so’.
The judge told him to hand it over, saying: ‘I can’t really see any reason to refuse the journalist access’.