TORONTO – “Then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.” That is Robert M. Friedland quoting Phineas Taylor Barnum.
Mr. Barnum, America’s greatest showman in the late 1800s, probably never delivered that famous bit of biz advice; there are zero attributions. Just like he almost surely never said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” (A mark, maybe, but no suckers in P.T. Barnum’s mix.)
Ivanplat’s Mr. Friedland need not get his attributions entirely correct. For one, he is with a slight nod to Robert McEwen, North America’s greatest mining showman. Second, he is almost surely a billionaire thanks to Mongolia’s Ivanhoe Mines and its Oyu Tolgoi copper mine.
Third, he is a miner’s mining exec. “He knows his metals, and his black box works,” platinum prospector and Ivanplats board member William Hayden told me the other day over fizzy water evening drinks in Medellin, Colombia.
Mr. Friedland’s Ivanplats Ltd. (TSX: T.IVP, Stock Forum) spiders a web of platinum-nickel-copper-zinc-& gold across South Africa and Democratic Republic of Congo. The IVP web starts near the top of southern Africa’s patriarchy with board member Cyril Ramaphosa, who conceivably could become president of the Republic of South Africa.
Ivanhoe Mines’ Oyu Tolgoi in the Gobi steppelands now operates under the umbrella of Rio Tinto (NYSE: RIO, Stock Forum) as freshly renamed Turquoise Hill Resources Ltd. (TSX: T.TRQ, Stock Forum).
Few gave Oyu Tolgoi earlier and better media coverage, most of it on-site, than the original The Calandra Report and my CBS MarketWatch in 2002 and 2003. “A jillion analysts said it could not be done,” Mr. Friedland said last week about Oyu Tolgoi, seen as the globe’s largest new copper mine (with gold).
I first met Mr. Friedland as a newspaper columnist in San Francisco, covering one of his gold presentations at the city’s Stanford Court Hotel in 1992 or so.
Here for the first time anywhere, is the first half of Mr. Friedland’s showmanship from Toronto’s PDAC prospectors’ convention of last week (March 4, 2013). His was a lively 26-minute affair, laced with racy references and put-downs of competitor miners. Of interest: not one of many media reports of his PDAC presentation contained correct quotes, as in verbatim. Nor did any of those wire-service and press reports relay little more than a sense of jubilation.
This TCR report contains entirely accurate quotations, with little need for comments.
Mr. Friedland’s Flatreef of platinum-group metals in the Bushveld Complex’s Platreef (South Africa) is one I have seen three times – once with Robert and twice, nearby, with R. Michael Jones’s Platinum Group Metals. Please note, Mr. Friedland’s references to the deposit size of Ivanplats’ Flatreef, a term, Mr. Hayden tells me, that the 62-year-old IVP founder coined.
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