Not so bad press from the Financial Times the other day. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frank Timis acknowledges he is a man with a past.
This week he has pulled off an agreement that burnishes his fame as a self-made entrepreneur, even if his reputation remains clouded by controversies that have overshadowed him for two decades.
African Minerals, Mr Timis's Sierra Leone iron ore company, provisionally agreed a $1.5bn investment - more than the company's market value on the London Stock Exchange - with Shandong Iron and Steel, a Chinese state-owned steel mill.
The agreement was the second one to emerge from the time Mr Timis has spent in China during the past year.
" I had a vision about this project, and the vision was that China was where to go," says the Romania-born chairman of African Minerals, referring to the company's Tonkolili iron ore project in Sierra Leone. The deposit is rich and promising, but it requires billions of dollars to build the mine and develop the rails and ports required to ship Tonkolili's ore to China.
" I [saw] many Chinese mills over the past nine months," he says, adding that he has been spending one week a month in the country. " We made ourselves known in China."
" I did not spend any other time in other places," he says.
He was in pursuit of the "corporate deal" that the company has been hinting at since January.
Long before he signed either of African Minerals' Chinese financing agreements this year, Mr Timis was promoting Sierra Leone with an enthusiasm that would have investors believe it is a stable country with firm rule of law and a can-do workforce; a country well past its bloody civil wars and whose mineral wealth and potential is vastly under-appreciated.
The Shandong Steel deal remains a non-binding agreement that is not completed. However, if it were to complete, the deal would also go far toward making African Minerals the venture most associated with Mr Timis........(continued)
" All kinds of people admit they have a chequered past, and the fact that they have the past does not mean they can't change their spots," says Ian Henderson, manager of JPMorgans natural resources fund.
He calls African Minerals one of his best investments last year.
" Frank Timis is in the mould of very energetic individuals. I meet lots of promotional and colourful and enthusiastic people in my line of work," Mr Henderson added, " and quite frankly, they are the people needed to get these projects going."
