Bolivia eases rules on gold holdings as liquidity crunch bites
By law, the institution must keep at least 22 tons of the metal.
Ross Beaty flipped the laptop around and pointed its camera to the sea.
“That’s a whale-watching boat,” the veteran mining entrepreneur said from Bowen Island near Vancouver. “There’s been a whole whack of humpback whales here yesterday and today.”
Beaty sounded excited, and why not? He’s got a history of drawing out big things from the deep.
Since 2017 as chairman, he’s built Equinox Gold (TSX: EQX; NYSE-AM: EQX) into a nearly 1-million-oz. annual producer with a C$3.5-billion ($2.5bn) market value. Its latest mine, Greenstone in Ontario, poured first gold in May and is ramping up to 400,000-oz. a year capacity.
That’s decades after Beaty sold one of his first companies, the similarly named Equinox Resources. Hecla Mining (NYSE: HL) bought it in 1994 for C$107 million. He immediately poured that into developing Pan American Silver (TSX: PAAS; NASDAQ: PAAS), which is now the world’s second-largest silver producer by stock market value, at C$11.3 billion. He stepped down as chairman in 2021.
Along the way there’s been his Lumina group of companies and sales like copper assets to majors including First Quantum Minerals (TSX: FM) and Franco-Nevada (TSX: FNV; NYSE: FNV). In 2008, he formed geothermal energy company Magma Energy, eventually bought by Innergex Renewable Energy in 2018 for $1.1 billion. And there’s been a persistent shower of awards.
They include the Association of Mineral Exploration of British Columbia’s Colin Spence Award in 2007 for excellence in global mineral exploration; the B.C. Mining Association’s Mining Person of 2008, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s Viola MacMillan Award in 2010 for leadership in management and financing; The Northern Miner’s Mining Person of 2011, the Canadian Institute of Mining’s Past President Memorial Medal, the Order of Canada in 2017, the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame in 2018.
Now he’s getting The Northern Miner’s Lifetime Achievement Award, to be presented in London, England on Dec. 2. He’ll be just back from touring Equinox’s seven other mines: Aurizona, Fazenda, Santa Luz and RDM in Brazil, Castle Mountain and Mesquite in California and Los Filos in Mexico. That followed a bicycle trip around Italy in October and a bike relay from B.C. to formally open Greenstone in late August.
Travel for business or pleasure has always been one of Beaty’s loves. It’s also exposed him to gruelling challenges that derailed some plans.
During a B.Sc. in geology in B.C. he trekked across South America and South Africa. He followed a master’s at the Royal School of Mines in London with backpacking across Africa and the Middle East to Japan.
“You’re young and carefree, took lots of risks, traveled hard, you know, the cheap way,” Beaty said. “I fell in love with Argentina on that trip. And then, when I started working there, my love relationship quickly turned to pure hate.”
It was 1999, Beaty was trying to develop a silver mine and encountered tough unions, high taxes and inflation and a populist government making things more expensive with currency controls. The problems persist today for President Javier Milei, elected last December.
“It just made it obvious to me it was one of the most difficult places of all of Latin America to work,” Beaty said. “The current president, he’s a breath of fresh air in that sense and I hope he succeeds in taming the beast that is these unrealistic expectations that Argentines have. I hope he does. It’s a tough nut to crack.”
The pressure was more overt in Russia after Putin came to power in 1999. Thugs eventually seized the one-third-built Siberian silver mine Beaty had been developing for four years.
“It just didn’t dawn on me that I might be shot,” he told The Northern Miner in 2022. “I kept going back to Russia and fighting them and fighting them. I eventually realized enough was enough.”
Then there was the time he was drilling in Liberia with Equinox Resources in 1985. The African nation fell into civil war, forcing Beaty to flee. Other tough stops around the globe included Bolivia and Haiti. A coup in the Caribbean nation prompted Ottawa to pull out Canadian companies just as Beaty’s project secured a licence.
“After the travel, what it did make me realize is just how big the world is and how interesting it is, and how many people are out there who have different views and not necessarily my own,” Beaty said on the Bowen Island shore. “I’d say it’s a very good thing for any entrepreneur to do, to travel a lot and to experience different realities.”
Taking his geology services global, plus a law degree that sharpened his communication skills, contributed to a self-realization that raised funding. It eventually led to Equinox Resources’ Rosebud find in Nevada that attracted Hecla.
“I found I was a good salesman,” he said. “I could sell, not just properties that had prospects, I could also sell stock. I could tell good stories and part people with their money and then, luckily, we actually made a couple of discoveries.”
It was a time in the 1970s when it cost Beaty just C$30,000 to list a company on the stock market including other fees. He said he’s not sure even his salesmanship could compensate today in a changed marketplace where juniors struggle to raise money.
“I was a creature of my times,” he said. “That amount is inconceivable today. Even with the value of money going down, there’s so many more rules. The Vancouver Stock exchange supported small companies and there were a lot of, they called them penny dreadfuls. It was contaminated with lots of crappy companies, lots of scams, but guys like me could actually get going. I don’t honestly know how I’d do in a market like today.”
Central to Beaty’s success has been a value investor’s accrual of inexpensive properties when commodity prices are low, reaping rewards when in turn the prices for silver and copper and now gold have shot up.
“You have to make things happen,” he said. “We had built a stable of assets and a mine in Peru, and just as we were about to go bankrupt in Peru in 2002, we had just done a desperation financing with the help of Bill Gates and some of our directors. And lo and behold, a couple months later, the silver price took off, and we haven’t looked back since.”
Back on Bowen Island, with whales in the distance and tales of whopping deposits in the past, Beaty reflected. Collecting rocks as a child, being tutored by a neighbourhood geology professor, working outdoors for a lifetime and seeing the world have all helped form his keen environmental interests.
Now he’s chair of the B.C. Parks Foundation with the goal of adding 10 million hectares to protected areas by 2030.
“I’ve always had this sort of a dual, you could almost say schizophrenic personality of digging up the earth and then trying to protect it,” he said.
“I like the mining industry. We need minerals. It’s part of everyday society. It’s not something that’s going to disappear, and it’s been a very rewarding career for me.
“But on the other hand, I’ve always been interested in in the environment, in trying to protect species, and if anything, that has become more important in my life now that I have the capital to support a lot of people who are doing good things.”
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