Titanium riches flow in wake of Sierra Leone civil war
Dredged from lakebed sludge, rutile is processed into titanium dioxide in Europe and the US for use mainly in paint, paper and welding rods.
Renowned for stories of child soldiers committing atrocities during a decade of civil war, Sierra Leone looked less than enticing to fund managers sitting in New York. So it was perhaps not surprising that Jean-Raymond Boulle, a Mauritian-born mining magnate, struggled to find Wall Street investors prepared to gamble on a mine that he bought when fighting was near its peak.
But when he explained he had acquired the world's biggest deposit of top-grade titanium ore, known as rutile, that he had high-level European and US diplomatic backing, and that peace had returned, attitudes changed.
Mr Boulle floated the mine as Titanium Resources Group on London's AIM market in 2005, three years after the end of the conflict that was fought largely over the country's better-known resource - diamonds.
Dredged from lakebed sludge, rutile is processed into titanium dioxide in Europe and the US for use mainly in paint, paper and welding rods. But titanium metal is also found in anything from Mars probes to artificial knees.
The revival of the mine, which once earned more than half Sierra Leone's foreign exchange, was a big vote of confidence in the country long before this month's peaceful elections underlined growing stability.
But for Mr Boulle, a veteran of spotting big mineral finds, the flotation proves a wider point: opportunities exist even in Africa's grimmest conflicts, provided investors can see beyond the headlines. "The most difficult thing was, how the heck do you raise money for a country like that?" he told the Financial Times. "Of course the press was so bad about the country, it's a miracle that we were able to actually take the company public.''
Less evocative than Zambia's copperbelt, Ghana's Ashanti goldfields and South Africa's diamond pipes, Sierra Leone's man-made rutile ponds were nevertheless once ranked among the continent's greatest mines.
Workers fled on barges when rebels stormed the plant in January 1995, kidnapping the human resources manager and other staff. Soldiers who recaptured it are said to have called an air strike to blast open the company safe.
Mr Boulle acquired the mine from Nord Resources, listed in New York, and Consolidated Rutile, owned by Australia's Iluka. He then spent roughly $100m to restart production in early 2006 of both rutile and bauxite. "I always knew it was going to reopen," said Alex Kamara, a 68-year-old manager who has returned to work at the mine almost 40 years after he first joined. "There was too much invested here."
Mr Boulle's record in picking winners, notably a highly lucrative nickel deposit at Canada's Voisey's Bay, reassured investors. Ospraie Management, a New York-based hedge fund, bought the biggest stake.
Political connections helped. Mr Boulle began his career at De Beers in Sierra Leone in the early 1970s, while Walter Kansteiner, the former US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, is a non-executive chairman of Titanium Resources Group.
Mr Boulle's dealings with Congolese rebels have caused controversy in the past, and Sierra Leone, where corruption is rife, has yet to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global mechanism aimed at reducing graft in resource-rich states. A European Union loan for EUR25m has, however, enhanced the rutile project's credentials.
