Yaounde, Cameroon Africa. January 2011 (Cameroon News) – Sundance chairman George Jones has moved at double pace to bring normalcy into the company after its board of directors was killed in an air crash in the jungles of Cameroon.

Cameroon Map

The company has however against all rumors it has been subject to proven that it is a survivor and that it has bypassed it casualties announcing that it will in the near future announce a major iron ore deal that will give the company a total makeover.

Sundance chairman George Jones states that he can never erase the fateful day of the crash, June 19 from his memory: it was the same night that he got the shocking news that the air craft that was transporting all the members of the board of directors of his company had crashed into the African jungles somewhere near Congo.

However he regained his strength and used up all of it to bring the state of affairs of his company into a state of total normalcy.

“I thought it was important to get out the message that while we hoped to find them, the company was not going to collapse in a heap. That was necessary for all of the stakeholders and all of the staff,” he says.

Every single member of the board of directors of the company was travelling in a Casa C212 aircraft while touring the site of the Mbalam project in Cameroon where it was reported missing in the dense forests that surrounding the region.

Those killed in the air crash included mining king and owners of huge billions Ken Talbot, chief executive Don Lewis, company secretary John Carr-Gregg and directors Geoff Wedlock, John Jones and Craig Oliver.

George Jones owing to health reasons had moved out of his post but did not even think for a moment to get back to his responsibilities when he was asked to following the air crash.

A lot of investors however in spite of what he has to say are of the opinion that the company y would not have ever been able to get to where it is now had he not been its skipper.

Though his primary concern was the tragedy which had taken away all his colleagues all at once he was even more determined to show the world that neither the company not the project that it had started off in Cameroon with a lot of hopes would be affected by the tragedy and would survive the odds.

“I thought steps needed to be taken straight away to stabilise the company and to start planning how we would get through it,” he says.

“Also, to detail planning on finding the bodies and then repatriating them. I felt a responsibility to all of the people, because I had become friends with them and I knew most of their wives and most of the stakeholders, major shareholders and countries involved.”

Once the bodies were found and the necessary formalities were complete, the next immediate step taken was the reconciliation of the stake holders and investors and assure them that the company was still very much the same and had the same strength and that it would get ahead of all the calamities that it was facing, which was not easy knowing that there were lots of rumors which indicated that the company would not survive.

“If someone didn’t do something very quickly, that was a possibility, but the company was in a strong financial position, which helped,” he says.

Because there were no longer any more board members, Jones employed certain defacto directors to bring the company back to normal and chief financial officer Peter Canterbury was designated as the acting chief executive.

Sundance was trading at 13c during the time it had to go through a trading halt on June 21, after the plane crash, but within no time came back to power and for the remaining part of the year has been going string at around 58c.

Jones says one of the first things he did was to was to get the company back to the Australian Securities Exchange and to talk to the government delegates in Congo and Cameroon, plus major investors in the US, Britain and Australia, to guarantee them the company was facing no major concerns.

“There was a concern on listing that everyone would dump the shares,” he says.
“That did happen for a start on the first day and then there was a lot of buying support. After re-listing, the shares traded sideways for a little while, until it became clear that everything was under way again. I then got on with the job of rebuilding the company.”

Putting himself once again at the top slot, Jones put everything including family on hold till his work was done and moved straight on to China a country with which he shared a very old relationship and commenced talks with companies to find out potential partners who were interested in entering into joint ventures with Sundance.

In September, Sundance issued a press release which indicated that it had inked a memorandum of understanding with China Railway Construction Corporation to deploy a railway for the Mbalam iron ore project in Cameroon and Congo.

The agreement with CRCC was to determine the scope, budget and timelines that would be necessary for construction of track and rolling stock to aid transport of around 35 million tonnes a year of iron ore exports.

An agreement of a similar kind was also announced with China Harbour Engineering Company within the span of another week after the rail agreement, which spoke about the construction of a port in Cameroon.

“I had to give people confidence there was a strategy to develop this project,” Jones says.

“The last six-month chart of our share price shows it really got serious after we announced . . . the memorandum with China Rail and China Harbour because people could at last see how we could develop this project.”

More investor support is expected to come in during the early half of this year, as Sundance as all geared up to tie up its research and announce a JV partner to kick off the project.

The company is expecting to put in a proposal on the construction of the rail line by the end of this month and as to who the joint venture partner is will be announced by the end of March.

“Because of the size and scale of the project, Sundance needs a joint venture partner and we are seeking expressions of interest from a range of potential partners and that process is under way,” Jones says.

“I’m very hopeful that by the end of the first quarter next year, which coincides with the completion of the definitive feasibility study, we would have identified who our partners will be.”

The company is now all set to turn into one of the biggest iron ore producers by the first quarter of 2014 and has got itself a whole makeover post the air crash, with the final step to the deal being the appointment of former Sinosteel Midwest executive Giulio Casello as the chief executive.

“I went into Sundance originally because I believe in the potential in that area. This is a serious iron ore province,” he says. “The region we are in has the potential to produce about 100 million tonnes of iron ore a year and it is very high quality.”