ANALYSIS: It has been a high-profile week for extremely private explorer Mark Creasy, with two major pieces of news that appear likely to add to his already significant wealth.
ANALYSIS: It has been a high-profile week for extremely private explorer Mark Creasy, with two major pieces of news that appear likely to add to his already significant wealth.
Yesterday Mr Creasy was revealed to be behind a major gold discovery in South Africa with White River Exploration, a company he controls, unveiling its initial resource on a giant discovery in the Witwatersrand Basin, in which it has a 65 per cent interest.
The project is a joint venture with South Africa’s Harmony Gold Mining and reportedly contains 11.5 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 8.9 grams per tonne.
White River controls 65 per cent of the project, and Mr Creasy’s privately held resources company, Creasy Group, holds 64 per cent of White River, while black economic empowerment groups own about a quarter. White Rivers chairman Neil Warburton was reportedly in London this week preparing for a planned float on the London and and Johannesburg stock exchanges next year.
Mr Creasy, estimated to be worth at least $480 million, was also linked to another recent deal, with Michael Fotios’s Eastern Goldfields making its second strategic investment this week, announcing today a $6 million deal to earn-in to Windward Resources’s nickel and gold portfolio in the Fraser Range.
Windward owns a 70 per cent stake in its Fraser Range North project, with Mr Creasy owning the remaining 30 per cent stake.
Eastern will earn an initial 14.3 per cent stake in Windward by subscribing for about 18 million shares at 12 cents each, equal to about $2.2 million.
Eastern will also participate in a one-for-four entitlement offer to raise a further $3.8 million.
The price of the raising represented a 19 per cent premium to Windward’s five-day volume-weighted average price.
Following completion of the raising, Eastern will have the right to nominate one director to Windward’s board.
Mr Creasy has made some big deals in his life.
The first came in 1994, when he famously sold the Bronzewing and Jundee gold deposits to Joe Gutnick’s Great Central Mines for $130 million.
The second came via Sirius Resources and its Nova nickel discovery, which is now being developed into a mine.
It was Mr Creasy who originally pegged the tenements at Nova and subsequently vended them into Sirius when it was a startup in 2010.
In line with his normal approach, he retained a 30 per cent direct stake in Nova and took a similar shareholding in Sirius.
Mr Creasy subsequently benefited in three ways.
First, the value of his Sirius shares soared after the Nova deposit was discovered.
Second, Sirius bought his direct stake in Nova for 70.6 million shares, $28 million in cash and a 0.5 per cent royalty on future production.
Third, he agreed this year to accept Independence Group’s scrip takeover of Sirius.
After selling about $4 million worth of stock or more than 2.3 per cent of the company in early August, Mr Creasy holds an 16.5 per cent shareholding in Independence worth about $370 million and, according to Business News reports last year, he also had $75 million in cash, and a 34.6 per cent stake in spin-out explorer S2 Resources.
Putting those together with the $28 million cash he got last year, he has affectively turned a parcel of remote tenements in the Goldfields into assets worth a combined $480 million.
In addition, Mr Creasy continues to be a substantial investor in junior explorers, including Coziron Resources and, more recently, Legend Mining and Azure Minerals.
Mr Creasy also holds a number of properties in West Perth, and no doubt many other assets out of the public eye.
