how about giving stephen a go

OZ Minerals board tilt and time to reject Chinese again
I just got this in mail box
can't help thinking he'd make a great director
As far as I can see a very smart guy who would do his utmost to be candid and honest.
he wants to vote against minmetals and do a rights issue which is exactly what I want

read this from his newsletter



When Rio Tinto walked away from China Inc on Friday, it's share price surged. That reaction should also prove the death knell to the Chinese Government's attempt to secure most of the assets of Oz Minerals at a fire sale price - a point I made forcefully on Sky's Business View program last Friday.

However, the Oz Minerals board is ploughing on with their endorsement when this is quite clearly contrary to the long term interests of the company.

I'm the only outside candidate running for the OZ Minerals board next Thursday and my position is absolutely clear - vote against the Minmetals deal and then do a discounted rights issue to take those pesky banks out of the equation once and for all.

After spending an hour with OZ Minerals chairman Barry Cusack a few weeks back, it was clear the board didn't have much appetite for going back into rolling crisis talks with its dysfunctional banking syndicates. After all, these same banks expropriated $95 million in fees out of the company whilst still refusing to give it a long term deal.

However, the situation has moved so far since the Minmetals deal was announced on April 1 that it is time to take a stand.

Several of the players have major conflicts. For instance, Oz Minerals CEO Andrew Michelmore has already stitched up a multi-million salary package with the Chinese Communists. No wonder he isn't repeating the effort of Vince Gauci at MIM in 2003 and speaking out against a bargain basement foreign takeover.

The same goes for the various Oz Minerals advisers who are sitting back and looking forward to their success fee if the Minmetals deal goes through.

With the share market now up almost 30% from its lows of March 9, the revised offer of $US1.206 billion by the Chinese Government for all the major assets except Prominent Hill is starting to look a bit under-done, especially with a contract for the $US211 million sale of Martabe now inked.

After all, with the Aussie dollar surging through US80c, the bid is now only worth $A1.5 billion - $250 million less than the $1.75 billion mentioned in the ASX release on April 1.

Indeed, the independent expert, Grant Samuel, believes the assets are not fairly priced given these words in the material sent to shareholders:

In Grant Samuel's view the Consideration payable by Minmetals of US$1,206 million is less than the underlying value of the Sale Assets. Arguably, the Proposal represents the realisation of a substantial part of OZ Minerals' asset base on terms struck at a time of particularly depressed prices for resources assets.

We have previously given the Oz Minerals bankers both barrels and particularly went after ANZ given all those advertisements it ran trumpeting the way it had helped Owen Hegarty get Oxiana up and running.

However, ComBank CEO Ralph Norris has now publically come out and suggested he would support an independent future for Oz Minerals after a couple of hard hitting columns from Robet Gottliebsen in Business Spectator. Gottie was also the most aggressive columnist when MIM was lost.

Whilst the two French banks and the nationalised British majors were clearly outrageously obstinate, the likes of Westpac also behaved appallingly with OZ Minerals when we were only talking about a company with $1 billion in debt and assets worth at least $3 billion.

The Big Four should have just passed the hat around to get OZ Minerals refinanced, instead we've had a completely unnecessary fire sale to the Chinese Government.

It is probably now getting too late for the board to change its view even though this rival Canadian proposal has now been submitted. The simplest solution now is for the major shareholders to vote against the deal and then simultaneuosly agree to back a capital raising.

The major Oz Minerals shareholders above the 5% disclosure threshhold at the moment are Barclays (5.11%), Morgan Stanley (6.89%), Bank of America (6.89%) and Blackrock (6.17%). All it would require is for these four to vote against the deal and the company would also avoid the break fee obligation to Minmetals.

Meanwhile, we've updated our list tracking Chinese investment in the Australian resources sector so you can see how broad the push is to snap up projects and companies or all sizes.

There's also this package of all our past commentary, AGM action and videos on OZ Minerals.