[miningmx.com] – MICHAEL Fleischer, top lawyer and executive committee member at Gold Fields, has resigned from the group in the first public casuality related to the controversial R2.1bn empowerment deal at its South Deep mine.
The company today announced it would seek a successor to Fleischer who could “… help implement the changes …” outlined in its August 22 press release in which it said it wanted to improve transparency and the “… timeliness of internal communication between management and the board”.
This followed an investigation into the company’s processes by US attorneys Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison (Paul Weiss) and was in the wake of comments by Gold Fields’ former chairperson, Mamphela Ramphele that the company had been forced to empower Invictus Gold, a company consisting of politically-connected individuals.
Invictus Gold, which now owns 9% of South Deep, has some 73 shareholders including Baleka Mbete, the chairperson of the African National Congress, and Jerome Brauns SC who represented President Jacob Zuma during the president’s rape trial.
“The South African government had shoved the list of some of Invictus Gold’s black economic empowerment shareholders down Gold Fields’ throat, with an ultimatum that if the preferred names were not taken on board it would be denied a mining licence,’ Ramphele told BDLive on March 12, 2013.
Flesicher’s departure is not immediate, however. He takes leave of the company on January 31. Fleischer, 52, was previously a partner in the corporate services department at Webber Wentzel, a private attorneys.
Gold Fields spokesperson, Sven Lunsche, declined to comment. “I would direct you to the announcement,” he said. “That’s all we are saying.”
There have been comments expressed privately in the mining sector that Nick Holland, CEO of Gold Fields, should pay the price for the deal as the most senior member left on the Gold Fields board (Ramphele resigned last year).
However, Holland said he believed he was the man for the job and had no intention of leaving the company.
Those comments may be thrown into fresh relief, however, if the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uncovers more details of board liability in its own, separate investigation, launched in September.
South Africa’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (the Hawks) also said in that month it would investigate the empowerment deal.
