Gleason,+Precocious+tycoon+rattled+mining,+B+Day




 * Business Day, Johannesburg, 29 September 2005**

=**Precocious tycoon rattled mining**=


 * David Gleason**

AN EXTRAORDINARY man has been taken from us — by what was clearly not a casual murder, but an assassination intended to send a clear and brutal message.

I first met Brett Kebble in late 1977 when I was appointed a manager at Vaal Reefs gold mine. He was 13 years old then and startled me by engaging me in conversation about the political economy. A year later, he told me he would join the National Party. When I expressed reservations, his response was that Afrikaners had to be engaged, and the only way to do it was from within.

Engagement was among Kebble’s most prominent driving features. He engaged and embraced a wide range of activities. A lawyer first, Kebble graduated from the University of Cape Town and was snapped up by law firm Mallinicks, where he quickly upset one of the partners but established himself as a smart, unusually capable, commercial lawyer.

His father, Roger, regarded by some as among SA’s most talented mining men, parlayed the family fortune into ownership of the old and marginal Rand Leases gold mine on the West Rand. From a struggling start, the mine’s resurgence was abruptly halted when a small earthquake buckled its operating shaft.

That was when Kebble, who approached neighbour Durban Deep for help and was turned away, conceived the idea of launching a corporate assault on Rand Mines, one of the oldest mining houses. Given the predominance of the houses and their imperious place at the top of the corporate ladder, this was an almost unthinkable proposition. It was certainly breathtaking.

Marshalling the family resources, and with the active involvement of others, notably Peter Flack, who was no stranger to corporate internecine warfare, the group persuaded Mercury Asset Management’s Julian Baring to get on board. At the time, Baring ran Mercury’s powerful general mining fund and held something approaching 30% of Rand Mines’ equity.

The battle for Rand Mines was short, sharp and entirely successful. It was the first time the mining establishment had been challenged — and beaten — on its own territory.

Among those who Rand Mines pushed into the front line of its defence was Mark Bristow, now CE of Randgold Resources and among Kebble’s bitterest critics.

Randgold was in the right place at the right time when Gencor, then under Brian Gilbertson, the architect of its translation into Billiton and later BHP Billiton, decided to shed some of its least profitable mines — notably Blyvooruitzicht, Buffelsfontein and Stilfontein.

With those mines tucked into the group, Kebble turned his attention to SA’s changing fortunes and to the nascent movement we now call black economic empowerment.

Responding to Anglo American’s decision to unbundle its ownership of JCI in favour of black ownership, Kebble cobbled together an empowerment consortium and twinned himself with former Robben Islander Mzi Khumalo.

After an agonisingly long struggle with a group led by Cyril Ramaphosa — during which JCI’s share price climbed to levels never again seen — Khumalo and Kebble triumphed. But the price was high, not only in money terms. When Khumalo transgressed corporate governance norms inside the house, a long-simmering antagonism between the two men burst into a conflagration that cost Khumalo his chairmanship and left the relationship in permanent animus.

There were mistakes along the way. Kebble misread the course of the gold price — not once, but twice. And he came to regret deeply the decision to share ownership of the South Deep project with Canada-based Placer Dome.

Passionately committed to SA, Kebble long held the view that the undue enrichment of the new elitists was an extravagance it could not afford and that the only way forward was to enlist the hopes and aspirations of the ruling party’s vast grassroots support base.

Neglect of this vital constituency, he believed, would bring radicalism and ruin in its wake. It was this that drove him to become something of a doyen of black empowerment advocates.

Many people, colleagues and peers, disliked him. Some respected his undoubted cleverness. Very few got close to him. He touched them all.

Devoted to his wife Ingrid and his four children, his murder leaves a hole not only in their lives but in those of his father, mother Julie, and his brother Guy; but, in a wider context, in SA’s too.

I fear what this event may portend.

From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A96721