FP Dealmakers: Inside Barrick’s attempt to gatecrash Newmont and Goldcorp’s party – by Gabriel Friedman (Financial Post – January 30, 2020)

https://business.financialpost.com/

FP Dealmakers: One question that remains for 2020, and beyond is what effect the expected consolidation will have on Canada’s mining sector

All through the holidays, Rick McCreary kept disappearing from his family, hopping on conference calls for long stretches without explaining what was going on. So it goes for a deputy chair of investment banking at TD Securities when a major merger is in the works.

In this case, it was between December 2018 and January 2019, and McCreary was advising Vancouver’s Goldcorp Inc. on its US$10-billion acquisition by Colorado-based Newmont Mining Inc., one that triggered a wave of other deals, and only closed after a series of bumps almost derailed it entirely.

“Honestly, it was the most stressful one I’ve worked on,” said McCreary. For McCreary, it carried a strong emotional weight because of the long and tangled history of the companies and people who worked on it.

McCreary had known Newmont’s head of corporate development Randy Engel for at least a decade; and in 2014, when McCreary was head of corporate development at Barrick Gold, he sat across from Engel at Newmont when the two companies grappled with the idea of a merger.

But negotiations broke down leaving a pool of acrimony on both sides, and McCreary retreated to TD not long afterwards. Now, he was helping Goldcorp be acquired by Newmont.

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