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Northern Miner – Mining Person of the Year Award

The Northern Miner’s 2000 “Mining Man of the Year” Keith Minty – by Vivian Danielson

Since 1915, the Northern Miner weekly newspaper has chronicled Canada’s globally significant mining sector.

Price spike and exploration success aid turnaround at Lac des Iles

Few mines have endured a rockier road to production than Lac des Iles, Canada’s only primary platinum group metals (PGMs) mine. It is no understatement to say that many viewed its construction as the epitome of industry folly. It is no secret that many thought the maverick mine would never meet expectations. And given the track record since operations began, in the fall of 1994, it is no surprise that, until recently, skeptics mostly had it right.

Lac des Iles had more problems and produced more red ink than most mines, but it also had unrealized potential, and believers who saw the opportunity to prove the skeptics wrong. One of them was Keith Minty, president of North American Palladium (PDL-T), who launched a major exploration effort aimed at expanding the operation, situated near Thunder Bay, Ont. Corporate house-cleaning also took place under his guidance, which better-positioned the company to take advantage of the recent spike in PGM prices. Another major priority was a technical review aimed at improving mining and processing operations.

Lac des Iles is now firmly out of red and into the black, but that is only one of several reasons why The Northern Miner has chosen Keith Minty as its “Mining Man of the Year” for 2000. If mines are made rather than found, he deserves credit for helping Lac des Iles take its rightful place in Canadian mining history.

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The Northern Miner’s 2001 “Mining Man of the Year” Grenville Thomas – by James Whyte

Since 1915, the Northern Miner weekly newspaper has chronicled Canada’s globally significant mining sector.

Perseverance may not always find its reward, but for a mining man and explorationist that knows the North, the development of the Diavik diamond mine in the Northwest Territories is a rich reward for persevering for 30-odd years in the Arctic.

Grenville Thomas, our Mining Man of the Year, was the original driving force behind the Diavik project, now under development by Diavik Diamond Mines, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto (RTP-N), and Aber Diamond (ABZ-T), the company Thomas founded. As an explorationist, entrepreneur, and a well-liked and well-respected mining man, Thomas is seeing a long career culminate in one of the biggest successes in recent Canadian mining history.

Welsh-born Thomas came to Canada in 1964 as a young mining engineer and worked for Falconbridge, first at its Sudbury operations and later at the Giant gold mine in Yellowknife. Setting up shop as a consultant, he became a specialist in mineral projects in the Northwest Territories and ultimately assembled a stable of his own properties.

Thomas incorporated Highwood Mines (later Highwood Resources) in 1975, and by 1979 it was a publicly traded junior, with three of Thomas’s Territories prospects — the Thor Lake rare-metals deposit, the Thye Lake copper-nickel deposit, and the Victory Lake massive sulphide property — as its principal assets.

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The Northern Miner’s 2002 “Mining Man of the Year” Goldcorp’s Robert McEwen – by James Whyte

Since 1915, the Northern Miner weekly newspaper has chronicled Canada’s globally significant mining sector.

The Northern Miner’s Man of the Year in 2002, Rob McEwen of Goldcorp (G-T), has probably squeezed more shareholder value out of a small number of assets than anyone else in the gold business.

McEwen, as chairman and chief executive officer of the mid-tier gold producer, has built one of the strongest contenders in that field with an aggressive attitude coupled with an uncommon gift for timing. As a company, Goldcorp has used the resurgence of the gold market as a springboard to top-level status among comparable-sized North American gold producers.

McEwen’s association with the mining industry, and more particularly its financial-markets side, runs deep. His father, Donald, was a financial analyst and investment manager who started his own firm, McEwen Securities, in 1967, after a long association with Equitable Securities and before that, Crown Life. One of the firm’s first in-house offerings was Goldfund, an investment fund that held gold, gold equities, and gold-backed securities. The fund did much to make gold investment available to the individual investor.

The younger McEwen took over leadership of the companies his father had founded, with the keystone company, CSA Management, as the principal holder of control blocks in other companies, including the nascent Goldcorp Investments. Interestingly, today’s firm non-hedger put Goldcorp into the gold-lending business in 1987, at the peak of the flow-through era when gold mines were going into production at a fast pace.

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The Northern Miner’s 2005 “Mining Person of the Year” – Virginia Gold Mines’ Andre Gaumond

Since 1915, the Northern Miner weekly newspaper has chronicled Canada’s globally significant mining sector.

Intense. Passionate. Tenacious. Shrewd. Visionary. These are the words that come to mind when describing The Northern Miner’s Mining Person of the Year: Andre Gaumond, president and CEO of junior explorer Virginia Gold Mines.

Gaumond is a graduate geological engineer from Laval University in Quebec City and holds a master’s degree in economic geology from Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique.

Early in his mining career, from 1987 to 1990, Gaumond worked as a mining analyst for several financial institutions, including Pemberton Securities and Midland Walwyn.

He then joined Corpomin Management as a technical and financial consultant, where he held management positions in various mineral exploration companies.

In 1993, Gaumond reorganized Virginia Gold Mines, assumed the title of president, and moved its head office to Quebec City — not a mining centre, but a picturesque city, ideal for his young family.

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The Northern Miner’s 2006 “Mining Person of the Year” – Ivanhoe Mines’ Robert Friedland

Since 1915, the Northern Miner weekly newspaper has chronicled Canada’s globally significant mining sector.

The world’s top athletes, scholars, artists and gurus all talk one way or another about the importance of finding and then living in that narrow zone that exists at the very limits of your intellect and abilities. But “working your edge” is a trickier thing in practice: staying too close to the familiar may lead you to stagnation and complacency, while transgressing too far across your normal boundaries can leave you broken and disconnected.

The business world, too, has its share of people who’ve lived and prospered “at the edge,” and we can think of no better example in our own industry than The Northern Miner’s “Mining Person of the Year” for 2006: Ivanhoe Mines executive chairman and founder Robert M. Friedland.

While there were other worthy candidates in this very busy year for the minerals industry, Friedland’s luring of British major Rio Tinto in October into a partnership to develop Ivanhoe’s Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold project in Mongolia’s South Gobi region struck us as a defining moment in one of the world’s biggest mineral-development success stories of the past decade.

(We’ve been covering Oyu Tolgoi’s astonishingly rapid advancement under Friedland’s direction since we first visited it in 2001, and its latest parameters can be seen on page 2 of this issue. Look next week in these pages for another in-depth, on-site report.)

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The Northern Miner’s 2007 “Mining Persons of the Year” – Agnico-Eagle’s Sean Boyd and Eberhard Scherkus

Since 1915, the Northern Miner weekly newspaper has chronicled Canada’s globally significant mining sector.

No company better embodies the spirit of Canada’s plucky gold mining sector today than Toronto-based Agnico-Eagle Mines, with its technical competence, unshakeable faith in gold, independent streak, and proven ability to execute truly visionary growth.

While Agnico-Eagle’s astonishing success over the past decade is the result of a team effort, the pair who have been leading the company in the boardroom and at the mine site during this exceptional period are the co-winners of our Mining Person of the Year award for 2007: Agnico-Eagle’s vice-chairman and CEO Sean Boyd, and president and chief operating officer Eberhard (Ebe) Scherkus.

Unlike the peripatetic career paths of many in the business, both Boyd and Scherkus have spent most of their working lives at Agnico-Eagle, and have maintained an admirable humility about their lofty positions and seven-figure take-home pay packages, perhaps having been tempered by living through several gold price cycles and seeing fate dish out equal amounts of heartache and glory.

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The Northern Miner’s 2008 “Mining Persons of the Year” – Aurelian Resourses’ Patrick Anderson, Keith Barron, Sephen Leary – by John Cumming

 John Cumming MSc (Geology) is the editor of the Northern Miner, Canada’s global mining newspaper.  jcumming@northernminer.com

Our “Mining Person of the Year” award for 2008 goes to the trio of Patrick Anderson, Keith Barron and Stephen Leary for their leading roles in the discovery, swift development and sale of Aurelian Resources’ spectacular, 13.7-million-oz. Fruta del Norte gold deposit, part of the Condor project in remote, southeastern Ecuador.

All three men are exploration geologists who brought varied backgrounds and plenty of passion to the task at hand at Fruta del Norte (FDN).

Anderson graduated from the University of Toronto’s geology program and, since then, has racked up over 14 years of experience as a geologist, entrepreneur and business executive. He’s worked for a variety of mining and exploration companies and consulting firms on gold, base metals and diamond projects in South America, North America and Europe.

Anderson was co-founder, president, CEO and a director of Toronto-based Aurelian Resources, prior to its takeover by Kinross Gold — a $1.2-billion offer launched in July and completed in September. Anderson now sits on the boards of Noront Resources, Colossus Minerals and U3O8 Corp.

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