Fortescue Metals Group’s chief financial officer Ian Wells is exiting the iron ore miner with $17 million of shares at the end of the month, joining a worrying exodus of talent over the past 18 months.
FMG said the highly-regarded Mr Wells, the company’s CFO since 2018, had resigned from his $3 million-a-year job to “pursue other opportunities”.
He will finish up with the Andrew Forrest-led group in less than a month on January 31, meaning he will not deliver FMG’s half-year results in mid-February.
His departure will be cushioned by his holding of 775,000 shares worth nearly $17m at Monday’s share price of $21.64.
As with former chief executive Elizabeth Gaines, who announced her intention to step in late-2021, no replacement has been named for Mr Wells, suggesting persistent shortcomings in FMG’s succession planning.
Mr Wells is one of FMG’s longest-serving senior bosses, joining the group in 2010 as FMG was experiencing growing pains.
Nonetheless, he is the latest in a string of executive departures at FMG that now leave just two of the 11 members of the senior leadership team listed in the company’s 2021 still with the miner.
Several leaders have also walked from the miner’s burgeoning green energy arm, Fortescue Future Industries, in recent months, while Tattarang — the Forrests’ private investment vehicle — lost chief executive Andrew Hagger in October.
Ms Gaines announced in December 2021 that she was quitting as chief executive but she had to remain in the role until August last year as Mr Forrest tried to entice a new boss.
She was not replaced until November when Mr Forrest lured across top Woodside executive Fiona Hick as the head of FMG’s mining operations as part of a revamped management structure that now sees the billionaire back in management control as executive chairman.
Defending his management style at the time of Ms Hick’s appointment, Mr Forrest said FMG was actually turning over less talent than its mining rivals but made no apologies for the “pace we roll at”.
“New people come in and they are surprised by it. It’s typical of a fast-improving organisation,” he said.
“People can find change often difficult and I have to remind people that there is no possibility of improvement without change.”
The group lost a slew of people after last-minute changes to FMG’s executive bonus scheme in 2021 deprived them of windfall profits from iron ore’s record price run.
Sources close to the company told The West Australian at the time there was “a lot of pissed off people, really pissed off” over the board’s decision to intervene to ensure senior executives didn’t bank bonuses deemed excessive because of the company’s recent share price surge.
About 30 executives missed out on about $50 million in bonuses under the revised performance-linked incentive scheme, which capped share rewards flowing from it at 28 per cent of their entitlement.
In November, former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia Guy Debelle quit as CFO of FFI after barely six months, citing the need to “focus on his health” after a cycling accident.
There was also no naming of a replacement when Mr Debelle stepped down, with FFI’s head of commercial Felicity Gooding instead put in as an interim CFO.
FFI chief executive Mark Hutchinson also defended the high turnover of staff in a recent interview with The West Australian, saying: “I’ve been on the board for start-ups over the last few years. . . you would expect. . . a reasonably high turnover, it’s not everybody’s cup of tea”.
He also conceded that “probably not” all the ambitious agreements the iron ore billionaire has signed across the globe will come to fruition but insists “the majority will be real”.
Mr Forrest said Mr Wells had made a “huge contribution” to the company’s finance team.
“Ian has made a huge contribution to Fortescue over what we will look back on as the formative years of Fortescue,” he said.
“Working closely with the Board, Ian and the executive team have played an important role in the development and execution of our capital allocation framework together with supporting Fortescue’s differentiating culture and values.”
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