Azure Minerals MD Tony Rovira reaps $24.2m from buyout by Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and SQM

The sale of vaunted battery metals explorer Azure Minerals has netted its long-serving managing director a bonanza payday almost 60 times the size of his annual salary. Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting and Chilean giant SQM on Thursday officially wrapped up their joint $1.7 billion purchase of Azure, delivering a huge windfall for directors of the acquired mining hopeful. Tony Rovira — who had helmed Azure since 2003 — was the biggest winner of that cohort from the $3.70-per share buyout. He controlled just over 6.5 million shares to pocket about $24.2 million, dwarfing his annual cash salary of $413,000. The finale for Azure as a publicly-listed company caps off its rapid ascent to market darling status since the turn of the decade. From 2006 to 2020 Azure was a relatively unloved stock on the hunt for base metals in Mexico’s wilderness, culminating in a small-scale zinc and lead mining operation. The COVID pandemic drove a shift of direction back towards WA. It offloaded the Mexico portfolio and subsequently purchased a 60 per cent slice of the Andover lithium and nickel-copper-cobalt project near Roebourne in the west Pilbara. Azure handed over 40 million of its scrip, worth about $4m at the time in July 2020, to famed prospector Mark Creasy for that majority holding in Andover packaged with two other early-stage projects. Mr Creasy has retained his 40 per cent piece of Andover following the Hancock and SQM acquisition. A string of high-grade drill hits sent Azure’s shares surging tenfold in the space of a year between October 2022 and 2023. During that period, in August, Azure knocked back a $901m bid from SQM by describing the offer as “underdone”. Mr Creasy’s Yandal Investments then upped its Azure stake from 12.1 per cent to 13.2 per cent in mid-October, before SQM lobbed an enhanced proposal at $3.52 per share later that month. Mining billionaires Gina Rinehart and Chris Ellison separately jostled their way into the takeover tussle not long after, effectively killing SQM’s solo quest for Azure. Two weeks prior to the start of 2024 Hancock and SQM teamed up via a 50/50-owned corporate vehicle — SH Mining Pty Ltd — to table the winning bid.