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Peter Munk, a Hungarian refugee whose ambitions led him to build hotels in the South Pacific and create stereos for Frank Sinatra, said goodbye to Barrick Gold Corp., the company he founded three decades ago and turned into the world’s biggest gold producer.
The 86-year-old Canadian businessman stepped down as the company’s chairman on Wednesday, a bittersweet moment for Mr. Munk, who has described Barrick as his life and the one thing that keeps him up at night.
“You can take, maybe, Munk out of Barrick. You can’t take Barrick out of Munk,” he said at the company’s annual meeting of shareholders in Toronto.
Mr. Munk knew nothing about gold mining when he took a stake in a small mine near Wawa, Ont., in 1983. He spent the next 30 years buying out rivals and building Barrick into a gold giant.
He has been succeeded by former Goldman Sachs executive John Thornton, who he says shares his vision of transforming Barrick into a Canadian-based mining titan with production in all types of metals.