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Australian mining company meeting ends in brawl
North America News.Net
Friday 29th August, 2008
A bitter dispute between shareholders of West Australian company Golden West Resources culminated in a fist-fight at a general meeting in Perth on Friday.
'Blood was everywhere,' one shareholder said, as two men broke into a fight following the meeting.
Two camps of shareholders involved in the iron ore explorer have been at war with each for several weeks. Portman Limited, a U.S.-controlled iron ore producer has acquired 24 million shares, or 19.9%, of Golden West, and was seeking to get two representatives on the board.
Proxies tendered at the meeting however indicated shareholders overwhelmingly favoured the existing board members.
Aside from the composition of the board, the meeting had been called to approve a placement of up to 25 million shares, together with 25 million options, which will further entrench the existing board.
Shareholders were also being asked to vote on a new constitution.
However the main cause of the bitterness between the warring camps was a proposed controversial purchase by Golden West of mining tenements owned by Mr John Doutch, who has close ties to the existing board. Portman has attacked the Doutch deal saying it had been rejected by a number of companies, including Golden West, previously. Portman took issue with the valuation, and highlighted that under the terms of the purchase Doutch would keep $820,000 which the company paid him as a deposit, if shareholders did not approve the deal.
Australian regulators have so far not intervened, although the company has previously come under notice due to a number of placements to Doutch associates that ocurred last year.
Despite the irregularities, and the cowboy antics of Friday's meeting, Portman is likely to be defeated by the Doutch connections. The formal outcome of the voting however will not be known until Tuesday because arguments over Portman's proxies have been subjected to legal challenge.
Friday's furore, and the bitter dispute which has played out in the pages of The West Australian, and the country's national newspapers, has added fuel to the fire of the debate that Australia's western state, particularly when it comes to the mining industry, is dominated by 'cowboys.'
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Comments on this story
Naheem the chop chop
09-01-08, 02:10 PM |
Respect needed for people who contribute positively against the odds
Are you trying to be witty “Con”? I hope your alias is not some dig at the poor bloke who has been charged with the unenviable task of creating and maintaining order over a shareholder base full of knockabouts, wannabes and predators. The only commercial bandits here are the Portman Group as they continue to benefit from their plundering ways, hallmarked by consistent duplicity in their stated goal v clear agenda approach! Shame on your naivety pilgrim...
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Con
08-29-08, 09:06 PM |
Australian mining company meeting ends in brawl
Your reporter has done a great disservice to cowboys.
Most of them are straight, that can’t be said for FAS and now the GWR controlled by FAS. Not only commercial crooks but also thugs.
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marbo
08-30-08, 03:14 AM |
Violent Attack
Im told John Doutch lead the pack attack on the one poor individual, up to 9 onto 1 im told which quite sums up Doutch, the puppet master pulling the strings of Golden West Resources. Its time for this circus to end and the federal police take down John and his cowboy directors......
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Anonymous
09-01-08, 02:41 PM |
bad info
As for you, marbo, you seem to have been “told” a lot of things about the actions of certain people on the day but your mail is far from accurate. I was there and, in my opinion, the blue was the byproduct of a tinderbox of emotion mixed in with money and historic rivalries, the patience of which is tested in the relentlessly boring procedure surrounding a meeting of this type. There were angry accusations flying around at the start of hostilities directed at the bloke who had copped a slap claiming that he had been going around threatening people’s families. This should be a cardinal sin in anyones book and although the use of violence should be frowned upon it is the language of the knockabout the world over, but Doutch was not the one who started it by a long shot.
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