Three month gold takeover bid
Renison Goldfields Consolidated snared control of Pancontinental Mining after a three-month takeover battle, this week 10 years ago.
The acquisition created one of Australia’s largest gold producers.
Renison’s scrip and cash offer valued Pancon at $513 million, which was planned to be acquired by its subsidiary Goldfields.
Renison’s intention was to move for compulsory of Pancon, however this was thwarted when the company only managed to obtain 87.6 per cent of Pancon’s equity.
Instead, Goldfields put up Pancon’s non-gold assets up for auction and eventually kept all Pancon’s gold assets.
LIHIR Gold, based in Papua New Guinea, revealed it planned to raise US$450 million from an initial public offering on the Australian Stock Exchange in September that year.
The funds, together with loans totalling US$300 million would get a mining project off the ground in Papua New Guinea, the company said.
The project, which started a decade earlier, had made substantial headway after the PNG government granted Lihir Gold a special mining lease in March that year.
Emission limits exemption ends
WESTERN MINING - now WMC Resources, and subject of a takeover attempt by BHP Billiton - planned to reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide at its Kalgoorlie nickel smelter, since it faced an end to a two-year exemption from stringent ground level emission limits which would run out in February 1996.
One alternative for the company was to install a sulphuric acid unit.
This was estimated to produce 500,000 tonnes of sulphuric acid per year.
Court refuses Bond leave to visit London
THE Supreme Court of Western Australia refused to allow failed businessman Alan Bond to leave the country to visit his new wife in London.
Judge Des Heenan said he did not believe Mr Bond would turn fugitive while abroad but ruled it was not in the public interest to allow the trip.
Mr Bond, who faced fraud charges, following the collapse of Bond Corporation in 1990, had married long-time companion Diana Bliss who lived in London, and planned to leave to be with her, the Supreme Court was told.
Stateships workers return to work
STRIKING dock workers in WA would return to work, a leader of the Maritime Union of Australia said.
The strike had stopped an estimated 30 ships from loading and unloading.
John Coombs, secretary of the Maritime Union, said the dock workers had accepted a recommendation from the Industrial Relations Commission that called for a return to the use of unionised dock workers at the Stateships shipping line until further talks were held in the following week.