Clough takes shine to Brazilian gold

Bill Clough is a rare specimen when it comes to looking at dynastic Western Australians.

For years he was closely linked to the family-dominated engineering firm Clough Ltd, initially as an employee in the 1980s and early 1990s and, until 2002, as a director. But, during the past two decades, the swashbuckling adventurer has increasingly forged his own way.

From the redevelopment of a run-down historic building to create the Left Bank bar in east Fremantle, Mr Clough has continued to break new ground, indulging his twin passions of geology and diving.

He has developed a stable of small-cap resource investments from Myanmar to South America, as well as managing to fund a historic shipwreck salvage venture in South-East Asia.

This week, Mr Clough’s latest enterprise, Serabi Mining plc, was due to hit the boards of the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market, the culmination of about six years’ work during which 17 million pounds ($A41 million) have been raised.

Serabi has capitalised on gold’s late 1990s slump, acquiring old workings of legions of garimpieros in the central north of Brazil, which Mr Clough located during a foray into the Amazon jungle.

A geologist by training, Mr Clough is enthused by the opportunity to make something of the region that was basically abandoned by investors, including Rio Tinto, whose drilling database for the area was bought by Serabi.

In the late 1990s, and on top of the poor gold price, North American investors had been spooked from emerging markets by the scandalous collapse of Canada’s Bre-X, which had been operating in Indonesia.

“I went in there post Bre-X,” Mr Clough said. “I thought it was a good time to look for gold. People said gold was finished but that has never happened historically.”

The Tapajos region, where Serabi’s assets are located, is dotted with workings where the industrious but technologically-deficient garimpieros had extracted the alluvial gold down to areas where the mineralisation changed and the ground hardened.

Serabi’s Palito mine has already started producing gold, recovering $US1 million of the precious metal in 2003 onsite by processing some of the richest ore through a CIP circuit process.

The company, which will be 41 per cent owned by Mr Clough and other Clough family interests post-IPO, intends to put the bulk of the ore through a flotation circuit process and then transport the resulting concentrate to Belgium for refinement.

Although the recent slump in the markets made the final stages of the Serabi float a little tougher than expected, Mr Clough can now claim a strong track record in Brazil, the home of one of a recent string of stockmarket successes for the businessman.

He is chairman of Australian Stock Exchange-listed Mirabella Nickel Ltd, which has performed spectacularly since it floated in July last year, worth almost three times its subscription price of 20 cents per share.

Mirabella is one of a number of projects that links Mr Clough to mining corporate finance specialist Craig Burton. Other companies at which the pair have worked together to take to the market include Exco Resources Ltd, Albidon Ltd and Sally Malay Ltd.

Another mining character linked through some of these companies to Mr Clough is Alasdair Cooke, who remains on the board of Albidon and Sally Malay.

Despite the extensive nature of this stable of entrepreneurial investments, Mr Clough remains wholeheartedly involved in other areas of discovery that don’t require his geological skills.

He continues to operate a shipwreck salvage business, more for passion than for profit, which recently received permits to operate in the Straits of Malacca off Malaysia.

Bill Clough 

• Linked to family’s Clough Ltd in 1980s and early 1990s, and as director until 2002.
• Has developed several small cap resource investments across the world.
• Serabi Mining due to list on London’s AIM.
• Serabi’s Palito mine in Brazil recovered $US1 million of gold in 2003.