Rich pickings: on the list one day, off it the next March 9, 2012 - SMH.
Poor Clive Palmer. One minute he is being cuffed around the ears by Frank Lowy, then Wayne Swan - and now he has been dropped from the global billionaires team by Forbes magazine.
It is not as if you could overlook Palmer - a larger and louder than most other life figure who revels in a good stoush - so Insider wondered how come he failed to make the cut.
A spokesman for Palmer reckons that ''it just shows how valuable that list is'' after it turned out that the Gold Coast champion was not among the 1226 ''richest people on the planet'' named by the magazine - let alone one of the 19 Australians to get a guernsey.
Last year local mag BRW (a stablemate of Insider) put Palmer's wealth at more than $5 billion, whereas when Forbes compiled its list of Australia's 40 wealthiest last month they credited him with ''only'' $US795 million ($753 million).
Commodity prices may have eased, but that is a gulf bigger than the one BP tried to fill with oil in 2010. Those in the Palmer camp suggest quietly the magazine has an axe to grind with the mineral magnate.
Insider understands, though, that the valuation gap is one of methodology; how you value unmined mineral resources. Forbes' contributor on the ground in Australia, Perth resource industry veteran Tim Treadgold, takes the view that whatever the billions of tonnes of coal and iron ore Palmer's company may have in the ground, you cannot just multiply those by the market prices for the in-ground reserves of exploration leases that have yet to be developed.
If that were the case, Treadgold thinks someone like Gina Rinehart could most probably vault into the trillionaire category, with Andrew ''Twiggy'' Forrest about half her size in wealth terms.
Insider has some considerable sympathy with that argument, because the big stopper for many a would-be mine is that the value of the minerals are outweighed by the cost of recovering them.
Not only does the owner have to find someone willing to finance building a mine, and most likely sell off a portion of the resource to get the funds, there are little things like trucks, trains, railways and ships that have to be built/bought/hired to get the coal and iron ore to market.
One small example of the valuation of unmined iron ore came only this week when Iron Ore Holdings (a resources dabble controlled by media mogul Kerry Stokes, who Forbes rates as a double billionaire) finalised the sale of a few million tonnes of spare iron ore leases.
It sold the Phil's Creek ground, rated to contained 54.8 million tonnes of ore, for a total of $42 million. That works out to about $1.30 a tonne - or close to 1 per cent of the cash price for iron ore on world markets. As they say in sport though, those little ''one per centers'' count.
ARH Price at posting:
20.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
