Flinders investors maintain the rage over stalled project
Frustrated minority shareholders of Flinders Mines have again used the iron ore explorer’s annual meeting to grill its board and management over perceptions they are suppressing its share price and stalling its progress. Flinders, which holds the big but low-grade Pilbara iron ore project, is majority owned by New Zealand-based family company Todd Corp following an uncompleted takeover attempt in 2016.Todd is also the driving force behind BBI Group’s plans to develop a $6 billion iron ore port and rail project in the Pilbara. BBIG is the logical partner for Flinders’ stranded 1.4Bt resource but some shareholders remain suspicious of Todd’s position as a majority shareholder in both companies. Shareholder Mark Moore said he had flown from Arizona to be at yesterday’s meeting and that Flinders were the only shares he owned. He accused the board of passing up opportunities to promote the company and suppressing good news.
“My retirement needs you to be a leader,” he told Flinders chairman Neil Warburton. Margo Gould accused the board of “sitting on our share price” by failing to repeat potentially price-sensitive information such as a September meeting of BBI with Baotou Steel in China at which the Pilbara project was reported as being the source of BBI’s ore. Other shareholders complained the company had not revealed that BBI had signed financing and supply agreements with other Chinese parties. Executive director David McAdam said BBI had an aspiration to use the company’s ore but no deals had been done and no contracts had been signed. Mr Warburton said the company had a policy to report only facts and did not seek to be either optimistic or pessimistic in its announcements. “We have a low-grade, isolated ore deposit,” he told the meeting. Mr Warburton said a structural change in China meant ore below 60 per cent was suffering big discounts. “We’re trying to upgrade the resource through our asset maturation phase to something with a six (60 per cent-plus) in front of it,” he said. “We’ve got to somehow get it to a grade at which we can sell it and make a profit on it. ”But Ms Gould insisted “Twiggy” (Andrew Forrest) was “out doing deals over the same stuff”. Shareholders were also miffed that the company did not make more of BBI’s plans for a railway line south from Balla Balla to within 40km of the Pilbara project. But Mr Warburton warned BBI’s plans might never eventuate and that funding continued to be Flinders’ biggest obstacle in realising its dreams of becoming a miner. He said the company’s share price had risen 400 per cent over the past two years under the current board.
