Sarah-Jane Tasker | July 01, 2009 Article from: The Australian
CAPE Lambert is fielding offers for the Lady Annie copper project it acquired through the purchase of CopperCo's assets, as it moves to remove the board of another of the failed miner's subsidiaries.
Cape Lambert Iron Ore executive chairman Tony Sage said yesterday that he had already received three offers for the copper mine near Mt Isa, in Queensland, a day after the $106 million transaction for CopperCo had been officially completed.
"There have been some offers out of the blue for that asset and the board needs to sit down over the next few weeks and assess the outright sale of that to the value of us exploring it further and getting a further price by spending more money drilling," Mr Sage said.
"We knew people were interested, but since we settled on Monday we have had three offers -- one from a Chinese group, one from an Australian group and one from an eastern European group."
The sale agreement for CopperCo needed to be structured to meet the recent ruling of the Takeovers Panel, which said Cape Lambert would have to launch takeover bids for each of the listed companies it acquired or sell down the shares when the purchase was complete.
Cape Lambert acquired no more than 20 per cent of any ASX-listed company, which included an investment in Buka Gold.
Mr Sage yesterday said that Buka Minerals -- which became a subsidiary of Cape Lambert through the CopperCo acquisition -- had requested a shareholder meeting to remove the board of Buka Gold and appoint a new one including himself.
Buka Minerals has a 20 per cent stake in Buka Gold, which Mr Sage said gave it a strong case to overturn the board because its existing directors only had an 8 per cent interest.
"I don't think it will be very difficult for us to gain control of the company," he said.
Mr Sage added that he had reviewing all the assets it had acquired since it first bought the debt off Macquarie for the CopperCo transaction. He said the Perth-based company had since approached the boards of the four Australian-listed companies it acquired to ask if they needed Cape Lambert's help and all of them except Buka Gold invited him on to their boards.
"We had been keeping an eye on them (Buka Gold) for six months and basically the board hadn't done anything and the share price hadn't done anything," Mr Sage said.
"We believe that the shareholders' interests are better served by putting in a pro-active board."
Buka Gold executive chairman David Hillier said he was not in a position to comment on the hostile move until after he had spoken to the board.
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