Duarte Da Silva: The destructIon of Anglo American

In 1999 Anglo American left Johannesburg for London. Dr Duarte da Silva has now priced what followed. He scores 13 decisions. He names the chief executives and chairmen who signed them. He sets their pay against the losses. Then he asks a harder question: what would a CEO true to the Oppenheimer method have built? And what did South Africa give away for an assurance? Anglo American’s response, which stresses the gains to its many South African shareholders, is attached below the article..By Dr Duarte F da Silva*.How four chief executives took the largest mining house in the world apart, what each piece fetched, what each piece is worth now, what they were paid while they did it, and what South Africa let them do. And the opportunity they squandered: the US$156 billion house a competent chief executive, steeped in the Oppenheimer method, would have left with the same cash in the same years.In May 1999 Anglo American arrived in London as the largest diversified mining house on earth outside Australia: gold, platinum, diamonds, coal, iron ore, base metals, paper, aggregates and steel, under one roof, built over eighty years by one family to outlast any cycle. Twenty-seven years and four chief executives later it is a copper and iron-ore company with a fertiliser hole in Yorkshire, a diamond business for sale at a twelfth of what it paid, and a merger that moves its head office to Vancouver. Nobody raided it. Nobody nationalised it. Its own executives dismantled it, in public, one announcement at a time, and called each announcement focus. This report scores every sale, every demerger and every purchase against what the asset is worth today, names the executive who decided and the chairman who approved, sets out what each was paid, and reaches the only verdict the numbers allow: the people who ran Anglo American sold what went up, kept what went down, bought at the top from the one family that knew the price, spent the proceeds of the gold on their own shares at the peak of the market and borrowed to finish the job, and were paid, every year, as if they had done the opposite. Then it asks the question the four boards never put to themselves: what a competent chief executive, steeped in the founder's method, would have done with the same cash in the same years. Part Two answers it at the closes of 22 October 2026. That house is worth about US$156 billion, third in the world, against the US$52 billion that exists. A hundred billion dollars was not lost to the cycle or the country. It was squandered..The method is deliberately narrow, so that nothing here can be waved away as hindsight. Each asset Anglo sold is valued at the price it fetched and at what the same asset is worth at the close of 22 October 2026. Each asset Anglo bought is valued at the price paid and at what Anglo has since written off or is now accepting for it. Demerged businesses count as value delivered to shareholders, not destroyed. Nothing is adjusted for inflation or the time value of money, which flatters the sellers at every turn. Every figure carries its date and its source, and most of the sources are Anglo American's own..THE QUESTIONI. What happened to the largest mining house in the worldAnglo American listed in London on 24 May 1999. Its first year-end value was US$27 billion. At the end of 2007 it was US$81 billion. On 22 October 2026 it was US$52 billion. Nineteen years, and the company is worth US$29 billion less than it was, after paying shareholders about US$30 billion in dividends and US$12.8 billion in buybacks and handing them the shares of Mondi, Thungela and most of Valterra Platinum.The peer comparison is the one the board has never made in public, so it is made here. At the end of 1999, its first year in London, Anglo American was worth US$27 billion; BHP was worth US$23 billion and Rio Tinto US$30 billion. Anglo was larger than BHP and within a tenth of Rio. The three were peers in every sense: the same London analysts, the same funds, the same commodities, the same cycle. On 22 October 2026 BHP was worth US$197 billion, Rio Tinto US$137 billion and Anglo American US$52 billion. BHP has grown eight and a half times, Rio four and a half times, Anglo not quite twice, and most of Anglo's doubling is the gold and copper price doing for a shrunken company what it did for everyone. Anglo is now a quarter of BHP and well under half of Rio. The two that pulled away did nothing clever. BHP's one great transaction was to absorb Billiton in 2001, the metals business Gencor had bought from Shell and listed in London, a South African house's cast-off; Rio bought Alcan in 2007 at the top and wrote most of it off, as Anglo did Minas-Rio, and still ended up worth three Anglos. Neither sold its iron ore, its copper or its coal when the price was low, and neither spent the proceeds of a disposal on its own shares at the top. The gap between US$52 billion and US$197 billion is the price of the difference, and it was paid by Anglo's shareholders and by the country that licensed its mines.The assets that left tell most of the story, and every one of them tells it the same way. Anglo sold out of AngloGold Ashanti between 2006 and 2009 for US$5.2 billion; the same shares were worth US$10.8 billion on 22 October 2026. It sold a fifth of Gold Fields in 2004 for US$1.2 billion; that fifth is now worth US$3.5 billion. It sold its last Valterra Platinum shares in September 2025 for R44.1 billion (US$2.4 billion); the same shares were worth R60.8 billion (US$3.7 billion) on 22 October 2026, thirteen months later. It paid R2.5 billion (about US$170 million) in 2021 to be rid of Thungela: it wrote a cheque to give a business away, and that business has since paid its owners R21.9 billion (US$1.3 billion) in dividends and is worth R19.7 billion (US$1.2 billion). The assets it bought tell the rest, and they tell it the same way too. Minas-Rio cost about US$5 billion to buy and US$8.8 billion to build, and US$6.9 billion of it was written off. The Oppenheimer family's 40 per cent of De Beers cost US$5.2 billion in 2012; De Beers has been written down by US$6.8 billion since 2023 and is for sale at about US$1 billion for 85 per cent. Woodsmith has taken about US$4 billion and two write-downs of US$3.3 billion, with no decision before 2028. Everything sold went up. Everything bought went down.A company that sold gold at a fifth of today's price, sold platinum a year before its earnings multiplied, paid to give away coal that then paid out five times its listing value, bought diamonds at a price never seen again from the family that set it, and spent US$10.5 billion of the gold money buying its own shares at the top of the market, is not unlucky. Luck does not run one way for twenty years. The question this report answers is whether it was a way of thinking, and the answer is that it was: one idea, that a smaller Anglo would be worth more than a large one, applied by four chief executives in turn, approved by four chairmen, rewarded by every pay plan the company published, and never once tested against the record of what the last application of it had cost. The buyback is the test case, because it is the one decision that cannot be blamed on a commodity price: the board chose its own paper over every asset it owned, and the debt that choice left behind decided what the next two chief executives were able to keep.Scoring what they did is only half the job. The other half is to say what a competent chief executive would have done in their chair, because a verdict without an alternative is a complaint. So this report runs the same years twice. Part One is the record: thirteen decisions, each with a name, a date, a price and what the asset is worth now. Part Two takes the same cash, the same prices and the same two mistakes at the top, applies the four rules Ernest and Harry Oppenheimer lived by, and prices the result. It comes to about US$156 billion, third in the world, with a gold division the size of Newmont's and the head office still in Johannesburg. The company that exists is worth US$52 billion and is fourteenth, and the gap survives the shareholder's objection that at least he was paid: counting every dividend, buyback and demerged share, the real company has given its owners about US$112 billion and the other would have given them about US$187 billion. The hundred billion between those two numbers is the opportunity, and the word for what happened to it is squandered: not lost to the cycle, which the house was built to outlast, nor taken by the state, which signed whatever it was asked to sign, but spent, on the company's own paper and on strangers' projects, by people who had the founder's rules on the wall behind them.Everything sold went up. Everything bought went down. Luck does not run one way for twenty years; a way of thinking does..What they did, and what it did to the company: market value at each year-end under each chief executive, with every scored decision marked in its year. The company has not been worth what it was worth in 2007 for nineteen years..Anglo today, against what it let go. Anglo's own former share of the assets it sold or gave away is worth US$37 billion at today's prices, seven-tenths of the company itself; the companies those assets now sit in are worth US$117 billion, more than twice Anglo..THE METHODII. How each decision is scoredHindsight is cheap, so the scoring is narrow and the burden of proof is on this report. A sale is scored on two numbers: the cash Anglo received, from its own announcement, and what the same shares or business were worth on 22 October 2026. A purchase is scored on the price paid and on what Anglo has since written off, or on the price it is now accepting. A demerger is not scored as a loss, because the shares went to Anglo's own shareholders; it is scored as value delivered, and the only question is whether the board valued it correctly at the time. Where a mine now sits inside another company, as Rustenburg sits inside Sibanye-Stillwater and the Free State mines inside Harmony, its value is the mine's share of the buyer's earnings applied to the buyer's market value, and the share is stated. Nothing is estimated that can be read off a screen. Dividends paid on the shares Anglo sold, between the sale and 22 October 2026, are tallied separately where the number of shares and the company's dividend history are both on the public record, and are stated as an addition to the price-based score rather than folded into it, so that each can be checked on its own.Three objections are met in advance, because the boards will raise them. First, that the proceeds were reinvested. They were: the company that took US$6.4 billion for its gold shares spent US$10.8 billion buying back its own shares in 2006–08, at prices it would not see again for a decade, and it is worth less today than it was then. That is where the gold went. Second, that commodity prices could not be foreseen. Conceded, and conceded again in full in the section on the defence. But the same board sold the metal central banks were buying and kept the gemstone a laboratory was about to replace, and every mistake went the same way; a board that cannot see the future should at least notice when it has been wrong in the same direction five times. Third, that executives are paid for the share price, not the ledger. That is the most revealing objection of the three, and it is answered in the section on pay: it is true, and it is the explanation.Currencies are those of the transaction, at the exchange rate Anglo reported at the time; today's values are at the closes of 22 October 2026, GBP/USD 1.3385 and USD/ZAR 16.49. Every score is struck in dollars: rand proceeds and rand dividends are converted at the rate on the day they were received, and rand values today at today's rate, so that a move in the rand between the two dates falls where it belongs. The rand has strengthened since the Valterra placing, which makes that loss larger in dollars than the rand figures suggest; it was weaker when most of Thungela's dividends were paid, which makes those smaller. People are named with the office they held on the date of the decision, because decisions have signatures. Chairmen are named because no sale or purchase of this size was made without the board: Sir Mark Moody-Stuart chaired it from 2002 to 2009, Sir John Parker from 2009 to 2017 and Stuart Chambers since November 2017. Every one of them approved every decision scored under his chairmanship, and every pay report that followed it. Text, tables and charts are priced at the close of Thursday 22 October 2026, the last close before this draft. TRAHAR, 2000 – 2007III. The first sales: the gold leaves the houseTony Trahar became chief executive on 18 July 2000, succeeding Julian Ogilvie Thompson, who had held both the chair and the chief executive's office and who retired as chairman in May 2002. Trahar was a Johannesburg accountant who had run the paper and packaging business, and he was handed the richest portfolio any mining executive has ever been given: more than half of AngloGold, a fifth of Gold Fields, the largest platinum producer in the world, the diamond cartel, the Free State, Kumba's iron ore, and a sprawl of industrial companies that a London register did not understand. The question for a man in that position is what the house is for. Trahar answered it in the only way a paper-company accountant could: it was for being understood by London. Everything that followed from him follows from that.His first years were tidying, and the tidying was competent. Terra, Hudson Bay, Samancor Chrome, Boart Longyear, Highveld Steel: industrial businesses the house had accumulated for reasons that no longer applied, sold at reasonable prices to people who wanted them. None of it is scored here and none of it needed to be defended. The Kumba restructuring of 2006 was better than competent; it left Anglo with seventy per cent of an iron-ore company that has paid a dividend every year since and was worth R49 billion on 22 October 2026, and it is the one decision of his tenure that the ledger marks right. It is right for the reason the rest were wrong: he kept it.Then the gold. In March 2004 he sold the fifth of Gold Fields to Norilsk Nickel for about US$1.16 billion, a stake that is worth three times that today before a cent of dividends, and nobody in London asked why a mining house was selling gold shares at four hundred dollars an ounce. In October 2005 he wrote the sentence that cost the house its gold: AngloGold was 'valued differently by equity markets', and Anglo's shareholders could buy gold for themselves. Read it again. It is a confession, dressed as a view about gold, that the chief executive had no view about gold and had decided the shareholders should form one instead. Taken to its end the theory abolishes the company, because there is nothing Anglo owned that a shareholder could not have bought directly. In April 2006 he acted on it, placing the first tenth of AngloGold at US$51.25, and in the same month he doubled the buyback to US$2 billion and told the market the purchases would enhance earnings per share. That is the whole of Trahar in one spring: sell the asset the house was built on because the market does not understand it, and buy the house's own paper because the market will like that. One floor down, with Anglo holding fifty-one per cent, AngloGold sold the Free State and Elandsrand to Harmony for the price of an office block, the mines Ernest Oppenheimer had drilled on faith and sunk eight at once; they now carry a fifth of Harmony's value and nobody on Anglo's board is on record as having objected.He left at the April 2007 annual meeting with the shares near their peak and the company worth US$73 billion, and he left before the bill arrived, which three of the four have in common. His defenders say he was a steward who simplified a sprawling group; and he was, for the industrial parts. But a steward keeps the estate. Trahar's two defining decisions, the theory that sold the gold and the buyback that began the debt, have between them cost the shareholders US$4.3 billion on prices alone and far more through the balance sheet they left behind, and for seven years of that he was paid about £17.5 million, which is set out with the others in the pay table. He is the least culpable of the four because he did the least, and the most important, because he set the idea the other three inherited. Nobody after him asked whether it was true.Trahar sold a fifth of Gold Fields and a tenth of AngloGold for US$2.2 billion, and let AngloGold sell the Free State for the price of an office block. He wrote the sentence that cost the house its gold, began the buyback that broke its balance sheet, and left before the bill arrived. CARROLL, 2007 – 2013IV. The exit from gold, the entry into iron ore, and the Oppenheimer chequeCynthia Carroll came from Alcan, the aluminium company, and became chief executive on 1 March 2007 with Sir Mark Moody-Stuart in the chair. She had been in mining for four years. She was hired, the board said, to bring a modern, safety-first, process-driven management to a house that London still found old-fashioned, and that is a fair description of what she did to the operations. It is the capital decisions this report is about, and on the public record the six years of Cynthia Carroll were the most destructive tenure of any chief executive of a major mining company in the modern era. That is what the ledger says, with no flourish added, and two-thirds of everything in it was signed in her six years by her and two chairmen.She finished the exit from gold, and she finished it at the worst moment the decade offered. In October 2007 she placed 67 million AngloGold shares at US$44, carrying out Trahar's theory at a higher gold price and a lower share price. In March 2009, with the world's banks on the floor, gold at nine hundred dollars and Anglo's own dividend suspended three weeks earlier, she sold the last 40 million to John Paulson at US$32. Paulson had just made the most famous fortune of the century betting against the consensus and was now buying the one asset that rises when everything else falls; he bought it from Anglo, at the bottom, because Anglo had declared it non-core three years earlier and was still carrying out the order. A chief executive who sells the same asset at forty-four and then at thirty-two has not changed her mind about anything. She has stopped looking. The 107 million shares she sold for US$4.2 billion were worth US$9.1 billion on 22 October 2026, and they have paid their new owners more than a billion dollars of dividends since, at a rate now of about a dollar a share a quarter.What she bought is the larger charge, because selling an asset cheaply is a mistake and buying one dearly is a judgement. Seven weeks into the job she paid US$1.15 billion for half of Minas-Rio, Eike Batista's iron-ore project in Brazil, and in July 2008, at the top of the market, US$3.5 billion for control. The project was to cost US$2.9 billion and ship in 2009; it cost US$8.8 billion, shipped in October 2014 and absorbed US$6.9 billion of write-downs. It is a working mine now, and it works. But it was bought from a promoter who was selling, at the top of a boom, by a chief executive seven weeks in the door, and the money that built it was the money from the gold. The board that would not hold AngloGold at a known price was willing to hold a Brazilian construction risk at an unknown one, and that inversion of judgement is the whole of this report in one transaction.Then the diamonds, and here the charge is closer to abdication than to misjudgement. On 4 November 2011, with Sir John Parker now in the chair, Anglo agreed to pay the Oppenheimer family US$5.1 billion in cash for their forty per cent of De Beers, settled the next August at US$5.2 billion. On one side of the table sat the family that had set the price of diamonds for eighty years and had just decided to stop. On the other sat a chief executive with four years in mining and a board that had never run a diamond business without that family in the room. The rough price had peaked that summer and has never recovered; the laboratory stone was four years from its first shop window. If anyone at Anglo asked the one question a buyer asks, why the seller is selling, the answer did not change the price. The forty per cent is worth about US$470 million on the price now being discussed. Her best-paid year, £8.1 million, was the year she signed that cheque. Mondi, demerged in 2007, and the sales of Tongaat and Hulamin in 2009 were well judged, and they are the only two decisions of her tenure that were. Her departure was announced on 26 October 2012; Macquarie's estimate that a third of the company's dollar value went in her tenure while its peers were flat or up is the kindest number available, and the pay, about £26 million, is in the table.Carroll sold the last of the gold to John Paulson at the bottom, bought an iron-ore project from a promoter at the top and paid three times its budget to finish it, and wrote the Oppenheimers a cheque for their diamonds at a price never seen again. Two of the three were done before she could have learned the business she was running. Her chairmen signed all three. CUTIFANI, 2013 – 2022V. The great simplification, and what it simplified awayMark Cutifani was the first mining engineer to run the company since the Oppenheimers, an Australian who had run AngloGold Ashanti and knew the South African mines from the shaft bottom, and he took office on 3 April 2013 with a salary of £1.2 million, a long-term incentive of 350 per cent of it and a £2.4 million buy-out of his AngloGold awards. He inherited a company worth US$30 billion with US$11 billion of debt and Minas-Rio half built, and within three years he faced the worst commodity downturn in a generation. His defenders have told the story ever since as a rescue: the engineer who cut the company to the bone, sold what had to be sold, and brought the shares back from 215p to over £40. Part of that is true and is given to him below. But the story leaves out where the debt came from, and the debt is the key to his tenure.The debt was not the cycle's doing. At the end of 2006 Anglo owed about US$3 billion. Over the next two years the boards of Trahar and Carroll spent US$10.5 billion buying the company's own shares and US$4.65 billion buying Minas-Rio, and by the end of 2008 the company owed US$11 billion: it had borrowed to buy its own paper at the top, and the paper was worth about US$3 billion by the time the dividend was suspended. That US$11 billion was still there when Cutifani arrived, was US$12.9 billion when the cycle turned in 2015, and in one week of February 2016 all three rating agencies cut the company to junk. Then he did what a man with junk-rated debt and a falling copper price has to do: he announced that Anglo would shrink from nine commodities to three, sell or close more than half its mines, cut the workforce from 135,000 to 50,000 and suspend the dividend. Eighty-five thousand jobs, to pay for shares the company had bought from itself eight years earlier. The forced sales that followed were forced by a voluntary purchase, and he did not make the purchase. That is the part of the defence I accept.The part I do not accept is what he did with the choices he had. Rustenburg, the mines that had made Amplats the largest platinum producer on earth, went to Sibanye in 2016 for R1.5 billion in cash and a share of future cash flow, booked at a loss, for less than the cost of one new shaft; the deferred payments came to R12.9 billion in all, and a quarter of Sibanye is now those mines. Thungela was worse, because it was done from strength. In June 2021, with the balance sheet repaired and the cycle turning up, he listed the South African coal mines with R2.5 billion of Anglo's cash inside the new company to get it out of the door, at a first-day value of R3 billion: a mining house wrote a cheque so that someone else would own its coal. Fifteen months later Thungela was worth R51 billion, it has since paid its owners R22 billion in dividends, and the valuation the board put on it was wrong by about R44 billion. Climate policy explains the demerger. Nothing explains the price. And in July 2021, in the best year the cycle offered and with five years of his own life spent paying for the 2006 buyback, he announced a new one at £30 a share and called it discipline. He of all people knew what the first one had cost.Two things are to his credit and are stated in full. Quellaveco, the Peruvian copper mine he approved in 2018 and built with Mitsubishi for about US$5.3 billion, poured in August 2022 and made US$2.3 billion of EBITDA in 2025; it is the one thing in this ledger that was built rather than sold, and the main reason Anglo has a copper business worth merging with Teck. And the shares that touched 215p in January 2016 were the best in the FTSE 100 that year and stood near £41 on his last day. Set against them are Woodsmith, a hole in Yorkshire for a fertiliser nobody yet buys that has taken about US$4 billion and two write-downs of US$3.3 billion with no decision before 2028; and De Beers, which he chaired for nine years while it carried the Oppenheimer purchase at the full 2012 price through the years in which the laboratory stone took the engagement-ring market. He signed accounts every one of those years that said the diamonds were worth what the family had been paid. The first write-down came ten months after he left.The pay is the clearest of the four, because the company's own ten-year table sets it out, and it is in the pay table rather than here. One figure belongs in the narrative. In 2018 he was paid £15.6 million, most of it from an award granted at about £2 a share in 2016, at a low his own plan had helped to produce, which then vested in full on the recovery from that low; a further US$8.3 million was forgone only because the plan was capped. The two largest pay revolts in the company's history, 21 per cent in 2013 and 41.6 per cent in 2016, were followed by larger pay, not smaller. Including his post-departure vestings he collected about £86 million, the largest sum ever paid to an Anglo American executive. A chief executive who builds one great mine and presides over Woodsmith, Thungela, Rustenburg, a second buyback at the top and nine years of fiction in the De Beers accounts has not earned the benefit of the doubt. He earned £86 million.Cutifani inherited a debt bought with the company's own shares and paid it off by selling mines at the bottom; that much was forced. Thungela, Woodsmith, the 2021 buyback and nine years of De Beers at the Oppenheimer price were not. He built Quellaveco, and was paid £86 million. WANBLAD, 2022 –VI. The platinum exit, the diamond sale and the mergerDuncan Wanblad is a South African engineer who had run Anglo's base metals and then its strategy, and he became chief executive on 19 April 2022 with Stuart Chambers in the chair. He inherited a company worth US$52 billion, De Beers still carried at the 2012 valuation, and Woodsmith. He is the only one of the four who was given a clear alternative in writing and refused it. On 25 April 2024 BHP proposed an all-share merger valuing Anglo at £31.1 billion; the board rejected it, rejected £34 billion on 13 May and £38.6 billion on 22 May, and BHP walked away. Between the second and third offers Wanblad announced his own plan: keep copper, premium iron ore and crop nutrients; sell steelmaking coal and nickel; demerge Amplats; sell or demerge De Beers. It was, line for line, what BHP had said it would do with the company. The board had refused to let BHP do it at a premium, and then did it itself for nothing.The execution of that plan is the verdict on him, and the platinum is the worst of it. In May 2025 Anglo demerged 51 per cent of Valterra Platinum to its shareholders, which is not scored, and kept 19.9 per cent. On 4 September 2025 it placed that 19.9 per cent in a one-day bookbuild at R845, R44.1 billion, to whoever would take the stock. Platinum had sat at about US$1,000 for a decade, which is the moment the Oppenheimer model says you hold; it then rose to a record US$2,924 in January 2026, Valterra's half-year earnings rose sixteen-fold, and on 22 October 2026 the shares Anglo had placed were worth R61 billion. The house had owned the largest platinum producer on earth for three generations and sold the last of it eleven weeks before the price went vertical, in an afternoon. A strategist does not get to call that the cycle. The cycle is the thing a strategist is paid to have a view on.The coal and nickel sales have gone worse than planned and better than feared: Peabody walked away from the Australian coal after a mine fire, Dhilmar took the same mines nine months later for slightly more, and the nickel sale to MMG was still waiting on Europe in October 2026. They are competent disposals of businesses the board had decided to leave and are scored as neutral. De Beers is not. He inherited the Oppenheimer purchase at full value and has written it down by US$6.8 billion in three Februaries; the preferred bidder for Anglo's 85 per cent, a consortium led by Gareth Penny, who ran De Beers for the family until 2010, was disclosed to the world by the parliament of Botswana, at a reported price of about US$1 billion. The man who used to work for the family is buying back at the bottom what the family sold at the top, and Anglo's shareholders have lost about ten billion dollars in between. Wanblad did not make the purchase. He is the one selling, and the price is his.Then the merger. In September 2025 Anglo and Teck agreed a combination that gives Anglo's shareholders 62.4 per cent, pays a US$4.5 billion special dividend, puts the head office in Vancouver and makes Wanblad chief executive of the result; shareholders and Canada approved it in December 2025, Canada on condition of the Vancouver head office, and in October 2026 only China's approval remained. The one thing to record about it here is the pay. Anglo's remuneration committee proposed that Wanblad and the finance director be guaranteed at least 62.5 per cent vesting of their 2024 and 2025 awards on completion, worth at least £8.5 million, whatever the shares did: pay for signing, not for the result. The proxy advisers refused it and it was withdrawn on 8 December 2025, the day before the vote, the only time in this report a pay proposal was stopped. His pay to date, about £17 million in four years, is in the table.Wanblad's is the shortest tenure and the plainest verdict, because the alternative was written down. BHP offered £38.6 billion for the whole company. The board said no, and then the chief executive sold the platinum, the coal, the nickel and the diamonds one at a time, each at the bottom of its own cycle, for less in aggregate than the premium BHP had put on the table, and is ending the company's independence anyway with a merger that moves it to Canada. The recovery in the share price since 2024 is real and belongs to him and Chambers, and the bear is given it in full. But a strategist who rejects a bid and then executes the bidder's plan without the bidder's premium has not defended the company. He has done the buyer's work for free, and asked to be paid a guaranteed £8.5 million for the merger that ends it.Wanblad refused £38.6 billion from BHP and then carried out BHP's plan for nothing. He sold the last of the platinum in an afternoon, eleven weeks before the price went vertical, and is selling the diamonds at a twelfth of what Carroll paid to the man who used to run them for the family. THE LEDGERVII. Every disposal, every unbundling, every purchase, scoredOne line per decision. Values are 22 October 2026 prices or booked write-downs. Where a mine now sits inside another company, its value is that company's market value times the mine's share of its earnings: 18 per cent of Harmony for the Free State and Elandsrand mines, 24.5 per cent of Sibanye for Rustenburg and Kroondal. The ledger scores shares at the price of 22 October 2026 and ignores every dividend those shares paid between the sale and that date; the exhibit that follows the ledger adds them back where the share count and the dividend record are both public, and they are not small. The charts do the rest..The ledger. Proceeds and prices from Anglo American announcements; today's values from LSE, JSE and NYSE closes of 22 October 2026 at GBP/USD 1.3385 and USD/ZAR 16.49; impairments from Anglo American results. "Not scored" means the asset's current value cannot be isolated from a public source; the decision is described and left to the reader..THE DIVIDENDS FOREGONE.The dividends foregone. Dividends per share from the companies' own histories (AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Sibanye-Stillwater, Exxaro, Valterra Platinum), ex-dates after the date of each sale, to 22 October 2026. Rand dividends converted at the average USD/ZAR rate of the year paid, on the same rule as the ledger. Sibanye's 2013–16 dividends are from secondary records and are worth about US$30 million of the line. The ledger's US$32.1 billion net is struck on prices alone; with these dividends it is about US$35 billion..Thirteen decisions scored to a number. Rust is value lost on 22 October 2026 prices or booked write-downs; green is Quellaveco's 2025 EBITDA..What Anglo got for each asset, and what the same asset is worth today. Only De Beers is worth less than Anglo paid, and Anglo was the buyer..R365 billion of four other companies is built on ground Anglo sold. Harmony is three-fifths ex-Anglo by earnings; a quarter of Sibanye is Rustenburg..The same decisions placed against the chief executive who signed them. Carroll's six years carry US$22.7 billion of the US$32.1 billion net on prices alone; Trahar US$4.3 billion; Cutifani US$3.8 billion net of Quellaveco and his own buybacks; Wanblad, so far, US$1.3 billion..Two-thirds of the loss was signed in six years, March 2007 to April 2013, by one chief executive and two chairmen, on five decisions: two AngloGold sales, Minas-Rio, De Beers and the buyback. US$22.7 billion, in six years, on five signatures. Add the dividends the sold shares have since paid their new owners, US$3.0 billion where they can be counted, and the net is about US$35 billion. Trahar's loss came first and set the theory the rest followed. Cutifani's is the only tenure with creations on it, Quellaveco and the two later buybacks. Wanblad's is the newest, and De Beers will be added to it when it signs..Everything the shareholders hold, against everything the boards threw away. The centre bar is a third of the left one..Anglo has paid its shareholders US$30.2 billion in dividends and US$12.8 billion in buybacks since listing. It threw away US$35.0 billion on the decisions above at today's prices, and about US$38 billion once the dividends the sold shares paid their new owners are added. The shareholders got back roughly what the board lost. Twenty-seven years, four chief executives, £150 million of pay, and the company ran hard to stand still.A third of everything the shareholders hold was thrown away on the way to holding it. The two numbers are the same size, and only one of them was a choice..THE BUYBACKVIII. The decision that broke the balance sheetOne line in the ledger explains most of the others, and the company reports it as a gift to shareholders. Between 2006 and 2008 Anglo American's board spent US$10.5 billion buying the company's own shares. It did so with the proceeds of the gold it had just sold, at the top of the longest commodity boom in a generation, at an average of US$49.50 a share, and it borrowed to finish. Eighteen months after the last purchase those shares were worth about US$3 billion, the company owed US$11 billion, and it suspended its dividend. Seven years after that, with the debt still on the books, all three rating agencies cut it to junk in a single week and it put more than half its mines up for sale. The sales made from weakness in 2009, 2015 and 2016 were made to pay for the purchases made from strength in 2006 and 2007. The buyback belongs in no shareholder-return table. It is the decision that put the house in a position where it had to sell what it owned at the bottom of the next cycle, it was made by every chief executive in turn, and it is the only decision in this report that no chief executive has ever been asked to defend.The programme began in the year the gold left. On 24 February 2006, with its 2005 results, Anglo announced a US$1 billion buyback; on 23 March it doubled it to US$2 billion, giving as its reason the 'enhancement of the Company's earnings per share'. That sentence is the only stated purpose the programme was ever given, and it should be read for what it says: not that the shares were cheap, not that the company had no better use for the money, but that fewer shares would make the same profit look larger per share. By the year's end the return for 2006 was US$7.5 billion in buybacks and a special dividend of 67 cents, and the 2006 annual report quoted Tony Trahar calling it 'one of the highest levels of capital return in the industry' and Sir Mark Moody-Stuart saying it 'underlined the Group's strong balance sheet'. A further US$3 billion was announced for 2007, bringing the total to US$10.5 billion, and in August 2007 the board added US$4 billion more 'on the back of our continued strong cash flows'. Anglo spent US$3.9 billion on its own shares in 2006 and US$3.1 billion in the first half of 2007 alone; net debt rose by US$2 billion to US$5.3 billion in six months, and the interim report attributed the rise 'principally' to the buyback. The company was borrowing to buy its own shares, and said so. In the same month, July 2007, it paid US$1.15 billion for 49 per cent of Minas-Rio. The cash for both came from the same place. Between 2004 and 2009 Anglo sold its Gold Fields stake for US$1.16 billion, its first AngloGold shares for US$1.0 billion, 67 million more for US$2.9 billion and the last 40 million to John Paulson for US$1.28 billion: about US$6.4 billion of gold shares that were worth US$14.3 billion on 22 October 2026. It sold the gold to buy its own paper, and it bought the paper at the top.By March 2009 the stockbroker David Shapiro had counted it: US$10.5 billion spent on 212 million shares over four years, about US$49.50 a share, and the shares were by then worth about US$3 billion. Three-quarters of the money was gone in eighteen months. On 20 February 2009, three weeks earlier, the board had announced its 2008 results: dividend suspended, buyback suspended, net debt US$11.0 billion, 2009 capital expenditure cut by more than half to US$4.5 billion, 19,000 jobs to go. The dividend, it said, was suspended 'in order to preserve the Group's strategic growth options'. The options it was preserving had been bought with the money the buyback had not spent. A company that paid US$10.5 billion for its shares at US$49.50 could not find US$1 billion for a dividend at US$12, and sold the last of its gold to a hedge fund the following month to help close the gap. The Miningmx columnist who added it up that week called the buyback 'money thrown against the wall'. Nobody on the board was asked to account for it; the chairman who had said it underlined a strong balance sheet retired on schedule that year, and the chief executive who signed the 2007 extension stayed until 2013. The wall is still there. The shares bought on the Johannesburg register were never cancelled. A British company may hold in treasury only shares bought on a recognised investment exchange, up to a tenth of its capital, and may not hold its own shares through a subsidiary at all; so the rand purchases were made by three South African companies created for the purpose, Epoch Investment Holdings, Epoch Two and Tarl Investment Holdings, owned by charitable trusts, funded and consolidated through Anglo's subsidiary Tenon Investment Holdings, and described in the company's own circulars as 'independent companies owned by charitable trusts' established 'as part of Anglo American's 2006 share buyback programme'. They held 112.3 million shares at October 2020 and 98.9 million after the share consolidation of June 2025, their votes waived; the shares remain in issue and the company counts them in its capital. Eighteen years on, Anglo still owns more than eight per cent of itself through a structure built for a decision it has never revisited, and every market value in this report is stated after taking those shares out. The programme is scored in the ledger on the same rule as every other purchase: the 212 million shares cost US$10.5 billion and, as the 187 million they became in the 2025 consolidation, are worth US$9.1 billion on 22 October 2026, nineteen years later, in nominal dollars; US$1.4 billion lost before a cent of inflation, and about US$6 billion lost in the dollars of 2007. The 99 million still sitting in the three charitable-trust companies are worth about US$4.8 billion at 3,625p, which on the share count of the day they were bought is about US$43 each: below the price the board paid, nineteen years later, before a cent of inflation. The 2019 and 2021 purchases, 61 million shares for US$2 billion, are worth US$2.6 billion and are scored as US$0.6 billion created, which is what a buyback below value looks like and what the 2006 one was not.The second and third programmes were smaller and made the same point at a lower price. On 25 July 2019 Mark Cutifani announced a buyback of up to US$1 billion at an illustrative price of £21.88, which he said 'demonstrates our applied discipline'. On 29 July 2021, with net debt at US$2.0 billion and the commodity cycle at its post-pandemic peak, he announced US$1 billion more alongside a US$1 billion special dividend, as a 'commitment to disciplined capital allocation' split 'to reflect the different preferences of our shareholders'. The shares were then about £30. In December 2023, with the shares at about £18 after the production cuts, the company bought none, and BHP arrived at that price five months later. The 2019 purchases, at £21.88, were below the price of 22 October 2026 and are conceded as a fair trade; the 2021 purchases, at £30 in the best year the cycle offered, were the 2006 decision made again by a man who had spent five years cleaning up the consequences of the first one, and who knew better than anyone alive what it had cost.Three things make this a strategy rather than a mistake. The first is that every programme was announced as cash arrived and every suspension as cash left: 2006 and 2007 on 'continued strong cash flows', 2021 on 'strong cash generation', and in 2009 and 2016 the opposite, when the shares were at US$12 and £2.20 and the only buyer with the money to act was the company that had just spent it. A buyer who buys only when the price is high and stops only when it is low is not buying value; he is buying the price. The second is that no programme carried a price. Not one of the five announcements names a share price, a discount to asset value, or a return against which the purchase was judged; each names a quantum of dollars and a reason to be pleased. A board that buys US$10.5 billion of anything without a limit price has not made an investment decision; it has made a decision not to make one. The third is the alternative that was in front of the board each time. In 2006 and 2007 Anglo still owned 41.8 per cent of AngloGold Ashanti and the Rustenburg platinum mines; the US$10.5 billion would have bought the 58 per cent of AngloGold it did not own, with change, and AngloGold was worth about US$43 billion in October 2026. In 2021 it owned Kumba, Minas-Rio, the Queensland coal and the platinum business it would sell four years later; US$2 billion was a Quellaveco expansion or a decade of exploration at the rate the company then spent. The board chose the one purchase that required no judgement about the ground, no geology, no permit, no partner and no risk of being wrong in public: the one purchase a mining house can make without knowing anything about mining.There is a plainer explanation than a failure of imagination, and it is printed in the company's own remuneration reports. A buyback does two things on the day it is announced. It raises earnings per share, by dividing the same profit among fewer shares, and it puts a buyer with billions of dollars into the market for the stock. Anglo's announcement of 23 March 2006 gave the first as its reason. Its executives' long-term awards were measured, in those years and since, on total shareholder return against a peer group, which is the share price plus the dividend, and vested at the price the shares reached. No dishonesty is alleged here, and none is needed to read the result. The plan paid for a higher share price. A buyback raises the share price while it runs. The people who chose the buyback over the gold, the platinum and the ground were the people the plan paid, and the plan paid them. A board that wanted the money tested against the ground had every means to do it: a limit price, a discount to net asset value, a return hurdle, any of which would have stopped the purchases in 2007 and sent the money elsewhere. None was set. The board set the one test the purchases were certain to pass, earnings per share, and then paid its executives on a measure the purchases were certain to move. The ledger records the choice; the remuneration report records who was paid while it was made; the reader may join the two. What can be said without qualification is this: in the two years in which Anglo had more cash than at any time in its history, the people running it could find nothing on earth to buy except themselves.That is the sense in which the buybacks belong in a report about the destruction of a mining house, and not in the shareholder-return line where the company reports them. A buyback is a management's statement that it has no better use for the money than the shareholders' own shares. Four Anglo managements made that statement, at the top of each cycle, with the proceeds of the assets they had sold at the bottom, and announced it each time as discipline. The shareholders got the cash the first time and the bill in 2009; the company got a shrinking register, a weaker balance sheet at the one moment it needed a strong one, and 99 million shares it still cannot vote. The weaker balance sheet had a sequel, and the sequel is the rest of this report. The US$11 billion of net debt that the buybacks and Minas-Rio left at the end of 2008 was still US$11 billion when Cutifani arrived in 2013, was US$12.9 billion at the end of 2015 when the cycle turned, and was the reason the rating agencies cut the company to junk in February 2016 and the reason Rustenburg, the niobium and the phosphates were sold at the bottom of that downturn: the house sold its mines in 2015 and 2016 to pay for the shares it had bought in 2006 and 2007. Every forced sale in this ledger traces back to a voluntary one, and the voluntary one was the company's own paper. The house preferred its own paper to the ground, and it paid for the preference twice: once at US$49.50 a share, and once more when it sold the ground to cover the bill.Anglo sold its gold for US$6.4 billion and spent US$10.5 billion on its own shares at US$49.50, then suspended the dividend at US$12. Seven years later all three rating agencies cut it to junk in one week, and it sold half its mines to pay for the shares. It still holds 99 million of them, worth less today than it paid. DE BEERSIX. The family sold at the top. The professionals bought.De Beers gets its own section because it is the purest test in the report. Everything else Anglo bought or sold was priced by a market. De Beers was priced by the people who had made the market, and they were on the other side of the table, selling.Ernest Oppenheimer took the chair of De Beers in 1929 and built the Central Selling Organisation in 1934, the single channel through which most of the world's rough diamonds were sold for seventy years at prices De Beers set. The family held the diamond price through two depressions, a world war, the Soviet entry into the market and the end of apartheid. In 2001 De Beers was taken private by the Oppenheimers, Anglo and Botswana. On 4 November 2011 the family agreed to sell its 40 per cent to Anglo for US$5.1 billion in cash. The rough-diamond price had peaked that summer. Laboratory-grown diamonds were four years from their first retail launch and seven from the day De Beers itself began selling them at a tenth of the mined price. The family that had spent eighty years learning what a diamond was worth sold at the top of the last upturn, for cash, to a board whose chief executive had been in mining for four years. If anyone at Anglo asked the one question a buyer asks, why the seller is selling, the answer did not change the price.Anglo completed on 16 August 2012 at US$5.2 billion, taking its holding to 85 per cent. Sir John Parker was chairman; Cynthia Carroll was chief executive. The price valued all of De Beers at about US$13 billion, and for eleven years Anglo carried it at or near that value while rough prices fell and synthetics took the engagement-ring market. Eleven years. Every one of those years the board signed accounts that said the diamonds were worth what the Oppenheimers had been paid for them. Mark Cutifani chaired De Beers through those years and left in April 2022 with the carrying value intact. The write-downs came in February 2024, February 2025 and February 2026: US$6.8 billion in all, taking the carrying value to US$2.3 billion. De Beers lost US$511 million of EBITDA in 2025. In May 2024 Anglo put it up for sale. In July 2026 the preferred bidder was named: a consortium led by Gareth Penny, who ran De Beers for the Oppenheimers until 2010, at about US$1 billion for Anglo's 85 per cent.At that price all of De Beers is worth about US$1.2 billion, a twelfth of what Anglo's purchase implied. The 40 per cent it bought for US$5.2 billion is worth about US$470 million. The 45 per cent it already owned, worth about US$5.9 billion on the 2012 valuation, is worth about US$530 million. Anglo's shareholders have lost about US$10 billion in De Beers since the cheque cleared. The buyer at the bottom is the man who ran it at the top, for the family that sold. The Oppenheimers read the market; the man they trained is reading it again; and in between, the listed company's professionals held the asset for fourteen years and lost ten billion dollars on it. The chairman who signed the cheque, Sir John Parker, was paid £650,000 a year while he did so.The family that priced diamonds for eighty years sold at the top for US$5.2 billion. The professionals who bought are selling at the bottom for US$1 billion, to the man who used to work for the family. Whatever the buyer asked, the answer did not change the price. THE PAYX. What the four were paid, and for whatThe table sets out what each chief executive was paid, on the basis the company reported each year, and the shareholder vote on pay. Figures before 2013 are emoluments, which leave out pension and share vestings; figures from 2013 are the single total figure, which includes them. The Carroll-era totals are therefore understated. Everything in it is from Anglo's own reports..Pay from Anglo American plc annual reports 2003–2025, read in full: directors' emoluments tables to 2010, total remuneration outcomes 2011–13, single total figures and the ten-year chief-executive table 2013–25. Votes from AGM results..About US$200 million paid to the four chief executives; US$35 billion lost on their signatures, dividends included. One dollar in every 175..What the four were paid, against what was lost while they signed. Solid bars are the figures in Anglo American's own annual reports, 2003 to 2025, read in full; hatched bars are one year of Carroll's vestings reported by the press and Cutifani's post-departure share vestings, estimated. The ratio beneath each loss is the pay received per billion dollars lost: Carroll, the worst ledger, was the cheapest at about £1.1 million per billion; Cutifani was paid about twenty times as much per billion lost, Wanblad twelve times..Three things stand out, and none of them is a coincidence. Pay rose fastest in the years the ledger scores worst: Carroll's £8.1 million came in the De Beers year, and Cutifani's £15.6 million in 2018 came from an award granted at £2 a share, at a low his own strategy had helped to produce. The two largest pay revolts in the company's history, 21 per cent in 2013 and 41.6 per cent in 2016, were followed by larger pay, not smaller. And the one attempt to tie pay to a deal, the guaranteed vesting on the Teck merger, had to be withdrawn the day before the vote because the proxy advisers would not wear it.The sums are small next to the ledger: one dollar in every 175. But the comparison that matters is between what the pay was for and what was delivered. Anglo's long-term plans paid out on shareholder return against peers and on cash flow. Both reward selling an asset for cash in a bad year, and neither cares what the asset earns for its new owner in a good one; and shareholder return, the measure every plan shared, is the one measure a buyback moves by arithmetic on the day it is announced. Every incentive pointed toward the sales and toward the buyback. None pointed toward keeping the gold, the platinum or the coal, and none pointed toward asking what the company's own shares were worth before it bought them. No allegation is made that anyone acted on the incentive. The observation is that the incentive existed, that the company's own reports describe it, and that the ledger is what a company would look like if everyone had.Every incentive pointed toward the disposals and the buyback. None pointed toward keeping the gold, the platinum or the coal. The remuneration committee designed the ledger before the executives filled it in.THE BEAR, METXI. What the defence rightly takesThe defence of Anglo's boards has five parts. Each is taken on its merits, and each is given everything it is owed.The first is hindsight. Gold at US$600 in 2006 did not announce that it would be US$4,040 in 2026. Conceded. But the AngloGold sales were not made on a view of the gold price. They were made on a theory that gold was a separate asset class Anglo's shareholders could hold directly, and the theory was applied in 2006, 2007 and 2009 whatever the price. A board that sells at US$51, US$44 and US$32 in succession is carrying out a decision taken before the market moved, whatever the market does, and the last sale, to the most famous contrarian in the world at the bottom of the worst financial crisis in seventy years, was the sale of a company that had stopped looking at what it was selling. Hindsight is a defence against one mistake. It is not a defence against the same mistake made three times at falling prices.The second is that the demergers delivered value to shareholders and should count for the boards, not against them. Conceded in full for Mondi. Conceded in part for Valterra: the 51 per cent demerged went to shareholders and is worth R158 billion (US$9.6 billion); the 19.9 per cent placed thirteen months before a R33 billion (US$2.0 billion) half-year is scored against the board that placed it. Not conceded for Thungela. A board that pays R2.5 billion to be rid of a business is saying the business is worth less than nothing, and the market has since disagreed by R44 billion, US$2.7 billion.The third is that the strategy has worked: Anglo is worth more than two years ago, it refused BHP at £38.6 billion and is worth £39 billion plus the Valterra shares, which is to say less than BHP offered, and the Teck merger makes it the largest copper-weighted major in the world. Conceded as far as it goes, which is to May 2024. From the listing to the BHP approach, twenty-five years, the record is a company that peaked at US$81 billion in 2007 and was worth US$36 billion at the end of 2024. The recovery since is real and belongs to Wanblad and Chambers. So does the Valterra placing, and so does De Beers at US$1 billion.The fourth is that the sales were forced: by debt in 2015–16, by BHP in 2024, by climate policy for coal. Conceded for 2015–16, when the balance sheet left Cutifani little choice over Rustenburg or the niobium; but the balance sheet was where it was because of Minas-Rio and the 2006–08 buybacks, US$15 billion spent in two years that took net debt from about US$3 billion to US$11 billion, and a forced sale caused by a voluntary purchase is still a decision. A company does not get to plead the cycle when the thing the cycle exposed was a debt it took on to buy its own shares. Not conceded for 2024–25. BHP was refused, and the plan that followed was a choice.The fifth is that the pay was approved by shareholders, by votes of 60 to 95 per cent in favour, and that shareholder return over Cutifani's tenure was positive. Conceded on both counts. The pay was lawful and approved. The claim is that it was earned on measures that rewarded the worst decisions in the company's history, and that the shareholders who approved it have since received, in dividends and buybacks, roughly what those decisions cost. The bear takes hindsight, Mondi, the copper strategy since 2024 and the lawfulness of the pay. He does not take the gold, the diamonds, the coal or the platinum, and he does not take the buyback, because nobody has ever offered a defence of it.The bear takes hindsight, Mondi, the copper strategy and the lawfulness of the pay. He does not take the gold, the diamonds, the coal or the platinum, and nobody has ever offered him a defence of the buyback.THE COUNTERFACTUALXII. What Anglo would be worth had it kept what it soldWhat would Anglo be worth today had its four chief executives simply held what they were given and done nothing? Public prices answer it, and the answer is humiliating. Anglo closed on 22 October 2026 worth US$52.0 billion. Add the AngloGold shares it sold, US$10.8 billion at that day's close; the Gold Fields shares, US$3.5 billion; Mondi, US$4.4 billion; the Valterra shares demerged and placed, US$13.3 billion; Thungela and the R2.5 billion that went with it, US$1.3 billion; Anglo's former share of the Harmony mines, US$2.6 billion; and its former 79 per cent of Rustenburg, US$1.3 billion. That is US$89 billion. Add the US$5.2 billion paid for the De Beers stake and the US$4.65 billion paid for Minas-Rio, neither of which needed to be spent, and it is US$99 billion. No interest is charged on any of it and no dividend foregone is counted. A chief executive who had spent twenty-seven years on the golf course would have left the shareholders nearly twice as rich as the four who worked..The world's mining league table on 22 October 2026, with Anglo American as it is, fourteenth, and as it would be had it kept the assets it sold and gave away, ninth, level with Agnico Eagle; or seventh had it also kept the cash it paid for De Beers and Minas-Rio, ahead of Grupo México and Freeport. AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields and Harmony, the three gold companies Anglo fed, are shown where they rank today. Source: companiesmarketcap.com, 22 October 2026 close..Anglo American is the fourteenth most valuable mining company in the world, behind a royalty company with forty employees. The Anglo that kept its gold, platinum, paper and coal would be ninth, level with Agnico Eagle and ahead of Glencore. The Anglo that kept its cash as well would be seventh, ahead of Grupo México and Freeport. Four companies below it on the table are made of what it sold: AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, Harmony and a quarter of Sibanye, together worth US$86 billion, more than Anglo itself. The children are worth more than the parent, and the parent sold them. Teck adds US$29 billion and a Canadian address. It does not change where the company would have been had the gold stayed. Doing nothing is the lazy counterfactual. Part Two runs the competent one, and the number is US$156 billion.Fourteenth, behind a royalty company with forty employees. Ninth had it kept what it sold. Seventh had it kept its cash. A chief executive who had done nothing for twenty-seven years would have left the shareholders nearly twice as rich.THE ONE-TRICK PONYXIII. The strategy that broke the houseErnest Oppenheimer did not build a gold company, or a diamond company. He built a house that owned gold, diamonds, platinum, coal, copper and industrial businesses at once, and a finance arm to move money between them. The point was the cycle. When gold was down, diamonds or platinum or coal were up, and the house could hold the asset that was out of favour until it came back, and buy from those who could not hold. So Anglo could buy De Beers in 1926, open the Free State goldfields in 1946, sink Western Deep Levels, and still be the largest mining house in the world in 1999. Diversification was not a side effect of the model. It was the model. It was the whole point. Four chief executives were handed it, and each in turn gave a piece of it away.Four chief executives in turn abandoned it, each using the same word, and the word was never once examined. Trahar started it. His strategic review of 26 October 2005 announced the sell-down of AngloGold, the separation of Mondi and the sale of Highveld and Tongaat because, in the release's words, 'we are creating a more focused mining group' and AngloGold was 'valued differently by equity markets'. Carroll carried it on: by 2010 she told shareholders that Anglo had 'become a much more focused and performance-oriented mining company' and would concentrate on 'the most attractive commodities: copper, diamonds, iron ore'. Two of those three are the two worst lines in the ledger. Cutifani went further in February 2016, promising 'a materially streamlined core portfolio of 16 assets' built on 'our global leadership positions in diamonds and platinum group metals' and copper, with bulk commodities to be 'managed for cash generation or disposal over time'; a year later, with prices up, he was 'the happy owner' of Kumba and the coal after all. Wanblad in May 2024 promised 'a radically simpler business' of copper, premium iron ore and crop nutrients, and called it 'portfolio simplification'. Four people, twenty years, one idea: that a smaller, narrower Anglo would be worth more than a large, broad one. The idea was never tested against the record, and the record was there every time, in the share price, saying no. Each simply inherited it from the last, the way a family inherits a debt..What each house mines. Anglo went from nine product groups to two, both tied to Chinese demand. The three majors that kept the model mine four, five and seven..The record says the opposite, and it says it in the accounts of the three companies that beat Anglo. The three companies that kept the diversified model are the three that are worth more than Anglo. BHP made US$26.0 billion of EBITDA in its 2025 year, US$14.4 billion from iron ore and US$12.3 billion from copper, and its chief executive describes it as 'a diversified portfolio of large, long-life assets'. Rio Tinto made US$25.4 billion in 2025: US$15.2 billion from iron ore, US$7.4 billion from copper, US$4.4 billion from aluminium. Glencore made US$34.1 billion in 2022, US$18.6 billion of it from coal, when its metals made US$9.3 billion; in 2024 its board asked shareholders whether to spin coal off, more than 95 per cent of those who answered said keep it, and the board kept it because 'retention offers the lowest risk pathway to create value'. That is the Oppenheimer model, run from Melbourne, London and Baar by people who were never told it was old-fashioned. In the year Glencore's coal carried its metals, Anglo had already paid R2.5 billion to be rid of its own.The reason the model works is the reason Anglo's sales all failed the same way. A company that sells one commodity at a time will always be selling the one that is out of favour, because that is when a board decides it is 'non-core'. Non-core is the word a board uses for cheap. Anglo sold gold in 2004–09 when gold was non-core at US$400 to US$900; it is US$4,040. Coal went in 2021 when coal was unfinanceable and Thungela was worth R3 billion; fifteen months later it was worth R51 billion. Platinum went in 2025 when it had been flat for a decade at US$1,000; it reached US$2,924 four months later. It sold the Rustenburg mines in 2016 at the bottom of the platinum cycle and the Free State mines in 2002 at the bottom of the gold cycle. A diversified house would have held every one of them, because it could afford to. A simplifying house could not, by its own definition. The strategy did not merely lose money on each sale. It guaranteed that every sale would be made at the worst time, and the ledger shows that it was, five times out of five.What is left is a concentrated company, which is a different thing from a focused one, and the difference is the difference between a decision and an accident. Copper and iron ore are the two commodities most tied to Chinese construction and Chinese manufacturing; they rise and fall together. Anglo has swapped a portfolio that hedged itself for a pair that does not, and it did so in the name of reducing risk. The City analysts who cheered each step said the market would pay more for a pure play. Berenberg said in 2024 that it struggled to see how the new strategy could match BHP's bid; Goldman said diversified miners 'do not currently command the valuations they have seen in the past'. But a fund manager at Janus Henderson said the other thing, which the ledger bears out: 'Firms that diversify political risk are more attractive than a single commodity company.' Twenty years of focus have left Anglo fourteenth in the world, worth less than the gold companies it fed, and about to be absorbed into a Canadian one. The simplest test of a strategy is whether the people who followed it are worth more than the people who did not. They are not. They are worth a third.Diversification was not a side effect of Ernest's model. It was the model. Four chief executives threw it away in the name of focus, and the three companies that kept it are the three worth more than Anglo. Non-core is the word a board uses for cheap.The national champion that was let goEvery other mining country kept its champion. Australia approved the BHP–Billiton merger in 2001 only on conditions that still bind: the group's global headquarters in Australia, its chief executive and finance director resident there, BHP Limited to remain the Australian-incorporated, ASX-listed parent, and most board meetings held in the country. The same Treasurer blocked Shell's bid for Woodside the same year because 'it is my duty to apply the national interest'. Canada blocked BHP's bid for PotashCorp in 2010 as not of 'net benefit to Canada', and in December 2025 approved the Anglo–Teck merger only on permanent conditions: the head office in Vancouver, the chief executive, deputy and finance director resident in Canada, a substantial Canadian share of the board, a Toronto listing, and at least C$10 billion of Canadian spending over fifteen years. Indonesia banned nickel-ore exports in 2020 and built an industry. Chile keeps Codelco. Brazil keeps a golden share in Vale. Norway keeps two-thirds of Equinor.South Africa, in October 1998, received an assurance from Anglo that it 'had no intention to leave South Africa' and that the London listing 'will not reduce Anglos' contribution to the economy', referred the matter to the Minister of Finance, and consented. No condition on the head office. No condition on the chief executive's residence. No condition on the listing. No golden share. No undertaking on what could be sold. Every condition Australia wrote into the BHP approval and Canada wrote into the Teck approval was available to Pretoria in 1999, and none was asked for. The largest mining company South Africa ever produced now has its decisions taken in London, its gold in Denver, its diamonds in Gaborone and its head office bound for Vancouver, and the two conditions that keep its successor in Canada were written by Ottawa, not Pretoria. The country is poorer for it in the plainest sense: the largest mining company domiciled in South Africa today is Gold Fields, worth US$31 billion, a company Anglo once owned a fifth of and sold, and it is the exception. AngloGold left in 2023. Anglo left in 1999. What South Africa has is the mines; what it lost is the house that decided what to do with them, and it gave the house away for an assurance.It will be said that the nationalisation talk drove it. The ANC Youth League campaigned for nationalisation from 2009; Carroll told a Cape Town conference in February 2011 that 'the false prophets who argue for nationalisation are advocating the road to ruin'; the Mining Charter was rewritten in 2010 and 2018. That talk may well have put the idea into the boardroom. But the dates do not support it as the cause, and the dates are not in dispute. The Free State mines went in 2002, Gold Fields in 2004 and the first AngloGold shares in 2006, before the campaign began. The ANC's own research rejected nationalisation in June 2012 and its Mangaung conference dropped it in December 2012, and the South African sales continued for thirteen years after that: Rustenburg in 2016, the coal in 2021, the platinum in 2025, the diamonds now. And the buyers who took the other side of that political bet were South African companies that stayed: Harmony, which now earns three-fifths of its profit from Anglo's old shafts; Sibanye, a quarter of which is Rustenburg; Thungela, which has returned more than R23 billion (US$1.4 billion) to its shareholders in five years; Seriti. The risk Anglo priced into its South African assets never arrived. The people who bet that it would not are the ones holding the assets, and the money. Anglo bet against its own country, and the companies that took the other side of the bet now own its mines.Australia wrote the head office into the BHP approval. Canada wrote it into the Teck approval. South Africa wrote nothing into the Anglo approval, and the mines went to people who bet the country would be fine. They were right, Anglo was wrong, and Anglo paid.THE FOUNDERSXIV. What Ernest and Harry Oppenheimer built, and what they saidWhat they builtErnest Oppenheimer arrived in Kimberley in 1902, aged twenty-two, as a diamond buyer for a London firm. He had no mine, no money of his own and no claim on the ground. Fifteen years later, on 25 September 1917, he formed the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa with £1 million, half of it raised in New York through J. P. Morgan and Newmont and half in London and Johannesburg. The story in the house was that he wanted to call it African American and was talked out of it; the name that was chosen told the world what the company was for: to bring the capital of two continents to the ground of a third. Its first business was the deep gold of the East Rand, which the older houses had judged too expensive to sink. Its second, in 1919, was the diamond fields of South West Africa, bought from their German owners after the war. Its third, by 1929, was De Beers itself, the company Cecil Rhodes had built, taken by a man who had started as its competitor's clerk.What he did with De Beers is well known: the Diamond Corporation in 1930, the single selling channel from 1934, the eighty-year discipline that kept a luxury scarce through the Depression, a war and the Soviet entry into the market. What he did with the gold is less told and mattered more. In the 1930s, when the Witwatersrand's outcrop mines were thought to be ageing, Anglo drilled where the geologists said the reef ran under the Free State. The boreholes went down more than a kilometre into bare veld with no road, no railway and no water. In 1946 the company committed to sink eight mines at once, at depths of 1,200 to 1,500 metres, in what was then the largest private investment ever made in the country. Welkom was laid out on the farms, a planned town for the mines, before the first shaft reached reef. The Free State goldfield went on to produce, at its peak and by the company's own account, about a fifth of the world's gold. Ernest did not live to see the last of the eight mines come into production; he died in November 1957, and the sinking of Western Deep Levels, which would become the deepest mine on earth, was about to begin.Harry Oppenheimer took the chair that year and held it for twenty-five. Under him the house became the thing this report describes, a system for holding the cycle rather than a gold company or a diamond company. He put Anglo into platinum through Johannesburg Consolidated Investment and the Rustenburg mines; into steel, with Highveld in 1960; into paper, with Mondi in 1967; into chemicals, explosives, coal, copper in Zambia, and the finance house that moved money between them. The Free State gold paid for most of it. When Sharpeville emptied the stock exchange in 1960 and foreign capital fled, Anglo bought what the sellers left behind, and by the late 1980s companies the group controlled accounted for more than half of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange's value. By one tally of his chairmanship the corporation reported R13.3 billion of profit and paid R7.1 billion of it out in dividends and R5.4 billion in tax, in the rand of the day, to a country that was at that time at war with most of the world. He sat in Parliament for Kimberley for nine years and said in the House what the mining houses did not say: that the colour bar was a cost, that black workers must be allowed to organise, and later, in print, that racial discrimination and free enterprise could not live together. After Soweto he founded the Urban Foundation with Anton Rupert to build the housing the state would not. He retired from Anglo in 1982 and from De Beers in 1984, and the house he left controlled most of the world's gem diamonds, the largest platinum producer in the world, and more of the world's gold than any other company.The point of all of it was written down in 1954, in the sentence quoted below: profits, but profits earned in a way that made a permanent contribution to Southern Africa. That was not a slogan attached to a mining house. It was the design of one. A diversified house that held gold through the diamond slump and diamonds through the gold slump could afford to be permanent in a way that a single-commodity company cannot, and a permanent house could afford to build towns, sink shafts that would take a decade to pay, and stay through a political crisis that it expected to outlast. The record Ernest and Harry left is in those decisions. The sentences below are the explanation they gave for them. Their successors kept the sentences on the website and reversed every decision.What the family did with its own moneyThere is one more record the founders' heirs left, and it is the plainest in this report, because it is written in their own sales. The family that built the house sold out of it in three steps, each one dated, and each one a year or two ahead of the decisions the ledger scores. The first came in November 2006, three weeks after Tony Trahar's departure was announced and thirteen months after his strategic review had promised 'a more focused mining group': E. Oppenheimer & Son sold 1.13 per cent of Anglo American, a third of everything the family held, to Larry Yung's China Vision Resources for about US$803 million, and said it would put the money into sectors that were 'traditionally counter-cyclical'. It kept 2.29 per cent. The second came in December 2010, four months before the De Beers negotiation began: 2.1 million shares at £30.44, £64 million, 'for portfolio rebalancing purposes', taking the holding under 2 per cent, with an assurance that there was 'no intention of selling further shares'. The third was the diamonds, eleven months later, for US$5.1 billion in cash. Nicky Oppenheimer left Anglo's board the same year. He had proposed that his son Jonathan succeed him on it; the board declined to consider it. 'You've got to move on,' he said, 'and now's the time to look to the future.' Below 3 per cent nothing has to be disclosed, and the family has not said since what became of the last 25 million shares.Score it the way the ledger scores everything else. The 1.13 per cent sold in 2006 became, through the buybacks and the 2025 consolidation, about 14.6 million of today's shares, worth about US$760 million on 22 October 2026: the family took US$803 million for it twenty years ago and has not been proved wrong by a dollar. Nothing else in this report can say that. Ernest Oppenheimer built the house on the principle that the family's money and the company's were the same money; his grandson separated them in 2006, finished the separation in 2011, and the people he sold to presided over everything that follows. A founding family does not reduce itself from the controlling shareholder of a company to a sub-2 per cent holder of it, and then to nothing on its board, because it is rebalancing a portfolio. It does so because it has read the people running the company and decided to be paid in cash rather than in their judgement. That is the vote of no confidence, cast by the only shareholder who had ever known what the company was for, cast with its own money, and cast before the worst of the ledger was written. Everyone who stayed on the register after the family left has been paying for not reading the signal.The family sold a third of its Anglo shares in 2006, went below 2 per cent in 2010 and sold the diamonds for cash in 2011. The people who built the house were the first to leave it, and they have not been wrong by a dollar since. Everyone who stayed has paid for not reading the signal.What they said, on the recordThe founders left a record, and the last section of this report says what I believe they would make of the ledger, in my words and on my responsibility. First the record. Ernest Oppenheimer formed the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa in 1917, bought into De Beers in 1926 and chaired it from 1929. His 1954 chairman's statement, which his grandson read out when the family left the company in 2011, said the aim was 'to earn profits, but to earn them in such a way as to make a real and permanent contribution to the well-being of the people and to the development of Southern Africa'. Anglo's own centenary website now softens 'permanent' to 'lasting' and 'Southern Africa' to 'the communities in which we operate'. Two words were changed, and they are the two that mattered.On diamonds, Ernest's rule was written down before the company existed: 'the only way to increase the value of diamonds is to make them scarce.' Harry Oppenheimer, who chaired Anglo from 1957 to 1982 and De Beers to 1984, told shareholders that wide price swings 'would be destructive of public confidence in the case of a pure luxury such as gem diamonds', and in 1982, asked whether De Beers should never try anything new, answered: 'No, the policy of De Beers must be to make new mistakes.' The listed company's executives made old ones. They bought the family out at the top of the diamond cycle, then presided over the thing Harry said would be destructive: a market with no custodian of scarcity, where lab-grown stones took the price and De Beers fell from US$13 billion implied to about US$1 billion in fourteen years. The rule was in the founder's own hand, and it was on the wall.Harry used Anglo's weight inside South Africa and refused to leave the country through the worst of its politics, when leaving was the fashionable advice. His 1980 chairman's statement said that 'racial discrimination and free enterprise are basically incompatible'. He died in August 2000, fifteen months after the London listing, and what he thought of it was never published. His son did speak. Nicky Oppenheimer sat on Anglo's board until 2011, sold the family's diamonds to Anglo that year in what he called 'a momentous and difficult decision', and in 2017 told the Sunday Times that the London move had been '100 per cent right' and that leaving Anglo was 'the right thing to do', because 'Anglo was becoming less strange and more normal'. That is the family's verdict on the house: it became normal. Ernest's company was strange because it held gold, diamonds and platinum through every cycle and controlled their selling. The normal company sold them, and now ranks below a royalty trust.Ernest wrote 'permanent' and 'Southern Africa'. The company's website now says 'lasting' and 'the communities in which we operate'. Two words were changed, and they are the two that mattered. The rest of the sentence was kept, and the rest of the model was sold.WHAT SOUTH AFRICA LOSTXV. The country that gave the licencesAnglo American was not a South African company among others. It was the South African economy's spine. In 1986 companies it controlled made up about 54 per cent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange; by 2006 about 21 per cent; by 2015 about 5.5 per cent. In 2013 it still had 162,000 employees, 72,000 of them in South Africa. In 2025 it had about 58,000, and after the Valterra demerger and the De Beers sale its South African business is Kumba Iron Ore, worth about R70 billion (US$4.3 billion), of which Anglo owns 70 per cent. One mine. Its 2024 tax and economic contribution to South Africa, on its own figure, was R111 billion (about US$6 billion), and that figure includes Valterra and De Beers, both of which are leaving.The country lost more than jobs. It lost the head office in 1999, and with it the decisions: every sale in this ledger was decided in London, by a board on which South Africans were a minority after 2007, for a London share register, about mines in the Free State, Rustenburg and the East Rand. It lost the gold: AngloGold Ashanti, formed from Anglo's gold in 1998 with 6.9 million ounces a year, has mined no South African gold since September 2020, moved its listing to New York in 2023 and is run from Denver. The mines did not stop; Harmony produces 1.43 million ounces a year, mostly from them, at a 58 per cent operating margin. The ownership stopped. It lost the diamonds: De Beers' sorting and sales left for Gaborone in 2012–13, and the company is being sold to a consortium whose other shareholders are Botswana, Namibia and Angola. And it lost the dividends. The 1999 argument, as Business Day's Hilary Joffe recorded in 2023, was that 'the dividends would flow back to SA'; government 'started to realise quite quickly that it might have been too quick to let go completely'. About US$30 billion of dividends have been paid since 1999 to a register that is now mostly foreign. The Public Investment Corporation's 6.9 per cent is the largest South African holding left in the company that once was the exchange.No one has put a number on what the London move cost the country, and none is invented here. What can be shown is this. The company that held 54 per cent of the JSE in 1986 holds Kumba. The gold that was all South African is none of it. The diamonds sorted in Kimberley and sold from London will be owned from Gaborone and Luanda. The decisions were taken in London by the executives named here and approved by the chairmen named here, and the South African state, which licenses every tonne they mined, asked for nothing in return and received it, in full.The company that controlled half the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1986 is Kumba Iron Ore. The gold that was all South African is none of it. The state that licensed every tonne asked for nothing, and received it in full.THE MINISTERSXVI. Who let it rideEvery decision in this ledger was the board's, and the responsibility is theirs. But a mining company holds its ground on licence from the state, and the state had a seat at every one of these tables whether it sat in it or not. The minister of finance controlled the exchange-control consent that let Anglo leave. The minister of minerals held the Section 11 consents that every sale of a South African mining right requires. The table sets out who held those offices when each decision was taken, and what the record shows they said or did. Where the record shows nothing, that is the finding, and it is the finding in nine rows out of eleven..Office-holders from the Government Gazette and the Presidency; statements from the Presidency (1998), Business Day, Fin24, Bloomberg and BizNews (2024), Miningmx (2026), Anglo American releases. "No statement found" means that a search of the public record on 21 October 2026 returned none; it does not mean none was made in private..In twenty-seven years, across eight ministers of minerals and six of finance, the South African state intervened once, in 2024, and then only to oppose a foreign buyer. It did not oppose the London listing; it referred it to the Treasury, which consented. It attached no condition to the Rustenburg consent, the Thungela transfer or the Valterra placing. It said nothing on the record about the gold leaving, the diamonds being bought or the diamonds being sold. The one minister who has spoken about 1999, Gwede Mantashe, said his government would not have allowed it: a statement about a predecessor's government, made twenty-five years late, in the week BHP came calling. Trevor Manuel, who gave the consent, has never explained it on the record. Every mining right Anglo sold was sold with the state's signature on the transfer, and the state has never asked, in public, what it got for signing. The answer, on the record, is nothing.PULL QUOTE: Eight ministers of minerals, six of finance, one intervention in twenty-seven years, and that one to keep a foreign buyer out while the dismantling went on inside. The state signed every transfer and asked nothing for its signature.THE VERDICTXVII. A house that sold the ground it stood onAnglo American was built by Ernest Oppenheimer on the principle that the ground was the asset and the cycle was the weather: profits earned 'in such a way as to make a real and permanent contribution' to Southern Africa, and diamonds kept scarce. His successors inverted every part of that, and the inversion has names. They threw away the diversified model that BHP, Rio Tinto and Glencore kept and that keeps all three worth more than Anglo, and they called it focus. Trahar sold the Free State, Elandsrand, a fifth of Gold Fields and the first tenth of AngloGold. Carroll sold the rest of the gold, bought Minas-Rio and bought the family's diamonds, and in six years lost two-thirds of everything in this ledger; her pay peaked in the year she signed the De Beers cheque. Between them, Trahar and Carroll spent US$10.5 billion of the gold money on Anglo's own shares at the top of the market, borrowed to do it, and left a debt that the next two chief executives paid off by selling mines at the bottom: that one decision, announced each time as discipline and measured by a pay plan it was certain to flatter, is the hinge on which the rest of the ledger turns. Cutifani sold Rustenburg at the bottom, wrote off Woodsmith twice, paid R2.5 billion to be rid of the coal, bought the shares again at £30, and collected £86 million, the largest sum ever paid to an Anglo executive, mostly on a share award granted at the low his own strategy had produced. Wanblad sold the last of the platinum eleven weeks before the price went vertical, is selling De Beers at a twelfth of what Carroll paid, and had to withdraw a guaranteed payout on the Teck merger the day before the vote. Four chairmen, Ogilvie Thompson, Moody-Stuart, Parker and Chambers, approved every decision and every pay report. The founding family watched the first of it, sold a third of its shares in 2006, went below 2 per cent in 2010, sold the diamonds for cash in 2011 and left the board: the one shareholder that had ever known what the company was for voted with its money, early, and has not been wrong by a dollar since. Through all of it the pay bore no relation to the ledger, and it rose in the years it should have fallen.The company that remains is a good one, which makes it worse, not better. Quellaveco works. Kumba pays every year. Collahuasi and Los Bronces are among the best copper mines on earth, and the Teck merger, if China allows it, creates something BHP wanted badly enough to offer £38.6 billion for. But it will be a Canadian company, and the South African house that owned most of the world's gold, platinum and diamonds will own none of them. That was not fate, or the cycle, or the ANC. It was a sequence of decisions, each with a name on it, each with a cheque on it, and each with a number the market has since supplied. The names were always public. The ledger that put them together was not, until now. The richest mining house in the world was dismantled by its own executives, in the open, over twenty-seven years, with the approval of four chairmen and, on the public record, the silence of nearly every minister who could have spoken. They were paid about £150 million, some US$200 million, to do it, one dollar for every 175 they lost. The shareholders who approved the pay got back in dividends roughly what the executives threw away. The state that licensed every tonne signed every transfer and asked nothing. And the company that could be third in the world, as Part Two shows, is fourteenth, behind a royalty trust, with its gold in Denver, its diamonds in Gaborone and its head office on its way to Vancouver.The ground was the asset. The executives sold it, the chairmen approved it, the ministers signed it, and all of them were paid as if they had found it.WHAT THEY WOULD SAYXVIII. What Ernest and Harry would sayThis section is opinion, and I give it as such. Ernest and Harry Oppenheimer cannot be asked, and the convention is that one does not speak for the dead. I set the convention aside, because I have spent a month with the record they left, their statements, their decisions, the things they built and the reasons they gave, and I am as sure of what they would say about this ledger as I am of anything in it. Every word below is mine. The judgement is theirs, read off what they did.Ernest would start with the diamonds, because he started with the diamonds. In 1902 he was a clerk buying stones for a London firm from the men who had Rhodes's company; in 1929 he had Rhodes's company; and he spent the next thirty years making the stone scarce, because, as he wrote before the company existed, that was the only way to make it valuable. I believe he would say this: that his grandson sold the family's last stake at the top for cash because he could read a market, and that the people who bought it could not; that a board which carried that purchase at the full price for eleven years, through the arrival of a stone grown in a week, was refusing to look at a diamond business rather than managing one; and that selling it now, for a twelfth of the price, to the man who used to run it for the family, is the market correcting a mistake the board would not. He would not be angry about the price. He would be angry that nobody at Anglo asked the one question a diamond buyer asks, which is why the seller is selling.Then he would go to the Free State, and here I think the anger would be cold. He drilled that field on faith, a kilometre down into bare veld with no road, no railway and no water, and in 1946 committed the largest private investment in the country's history to sink eight mines at once. The mines are there. The town is there. The shafts are hoisting gold at four thousand dollars an ounce. His house sold them in 2001 and 2002 for US$339 million, when gold was under three hundred dollars, because the price was low, and the house he built was built on the single principle that you do not sell the asset that is out of favour, you hold it until it comes back and you buy from the people who cannot. I believe he would say that the men who sold the Free State at the bottom of the cycle because it was the bottom of the cycle had not understood the first thing about the company they were paid to run, and that Harmony, which bought it and now earns three-fifths of its profit from it, understood the company better than its own executives did. He would then ask who signed, and the names are in this report.Harry's verdict would be shorter and harsher, because the things he built are the things that are gone. He put the house into platinum; it was sold at the bottom in 2016 and the last of it placed in a day, eleven weeks before the price went vertical. He built the coal; it was given away with a cheque attached, and it has since paid its new owners twenty-two billion rand. He ran the house for twenty-five years on the rule that the cycle is the weather and the ground is the asset, and he watched his successors invert it in every commodity, in sequence, for twenty years. I believe he would say that the strategy his successors called focus was a word for not being able to hold, and that a mining house which cannot hold has no reason to exist, which is what the market has said by rating it fourteenth. And I believe he would say one thing about the buyback that nobody on the board has said: that a management which can find nothing on earth to buy except its own shares has told its shareholders, in the plainest language there is, that it has run out of ideas, and should have been replaced rather than paid.On leaving the country, Harry's view is the one I am most certain of, because he lived it. He stayed through Sharpeville and bought. He stayed through 1976 and built houses. He stayed through 1985 and put his name to the call for the end of the thing he had opposed in Parliament thirty years earlier. He stayed because the house was built to stay; that is what 'permanent' meant in his father's sentence, and it is the word the company's website has since removed. The company left fifteen months before he died, with an assurance to the state that it had no intention of leaving, and it has been leaving ever since: the gold to Denver, the diamonds to Gaborone, the decisions to London and now the head office to Vancouver. His son has said the move was right because Anglo was becoming 'less strange and more normal'. I believe Harry would say that strange was the point: that a normal mining company sells its gold when gold is cheap, and that the whole reason for building a house that was not normal was to be the buyer on that day, not the seller. The normal company is worth a quarter of BHP. The strange one was worth more than BHP.What the two of them would say together is what this report says, and I will not pretend to a modesty the numbers do not allow. They would say that the house was not destroyed by luck, or by the cycle, or by the ANC, because it was built to survive all three and did, for eighty years. They would say it was destroyed by four chief executives who sold the gold at a fifth of its price, bought the diamonds at the top from the family itself, bought their own shares at the peak with the gold money and borrowed to finish, and kept the one mine that needed US$6.9 billion of write-downs; by four chairmen who approved all of it; and by a pay system that rewarded every step. They would say the ministers who signed the transfers and asked nothing should have asked. And they would say that the people who did this were paid about £150 million to do it, which is the one number in this report that I think would have left both men without words.Ernest would ask who signed. Harry would say that focus was a word for not being able to hold, and that a management which can find nothing to buy but its own shares has run out of ideas and should have been replaced rather than paid. The judgement is theirs, read off what they did. The words are mine.THE EXECUTIVES OF ANGLO AMERICAN SOLD GOLD AT A FIFTH OF ITS PRICE, PLATINUM A YEAR BEFORE ITS EARNINGS MULTIPLIED, AND COAL WITH A CHEQUE ATTACHED. THEY BOUGHT IRON ORE AND DIAMONDS AT THE TOP, AND SPENT US$10.5 BILLION OF THE GOLD MONEY ON THEIR OWN SHARES AT THE PEAK. THE COMPANY IS WORTH LESS THAN IN 2007.THIRTEEN DECISIONS SCORED TO A NUMBER COST US$32 BILLION NET ON PRICES, AND US$35 BILLION ONCE THE DIVIDENDS THE SOLD SHARES HAVE PAID THEIR NEW OWNERS ARE COUNTED. THE DEBT TAKEN ON TO BUY THE COMPANY'S OWN PAPER FORCED EVERY SALE AT THE BOTTOM THAT FOLLOWED, AND TOOK THE HOUSE TO JUNK IN 2016. FOUR CHIEF EXECUTIVES WERE PAID ABOUT £150 MILLION WHILE THEY SIGNED, ON A MEASURE THE BUYBACK WAS DESIGNED TO MOVE. THE DIVERSIFIED HOUSE ERNEST OPPENHEIMER BUILT IS A TWO-COMMODITY COMPANY, FOURTEENTH IN THE WORLD, WHERE DOING NOTHING WOULD HAVE LEFT IT SEVENTH AND THE FOUNDER'S RULES THIRD; THE COUNTRY THAT LICENSED IT KEPT NO CHAMPION; AND THE MINISTERS WHO COULD HAVE ASKED WHY, DID NOT.PART TWO · THE SQUANDERED HOUSEWhat a competent chief executive, steeped in the Oppenheimer method, would have donePart One is a post-mortem. It says what four chief executives did with Ernest Oppenheimer's house and what each decision has since cost, and it stops where a post-mortem stops, at the body. But a ledger of what was lost is only half an answer, because the question a shareholder wants answered is what a competent executive would have done instead, with the same cash, in the same years, facing the same prices, and what that house would be worth now. That is a harder question, and it is the one the four boards never put to themselves. Part Two puts it. The answer, worked line by line at the closes of 22 October 2026, is a company worth about US$156 billion, third in the world, against the US$52 billion that exists. The gap is the opportunity. It was not lost to the cycle, or to the country, or to bad luck. It was squandered, in the plain sense of the word, by people who had the founder's rule on the wall behind them and spent twenty years doing the opposite of it.The method is narrow on purpose, so that it can be attacked. I give the chief executive no foresight and no genius. Every decision in the Part One ledger stands except two: the buybacks are cancelled and the gold shares are not sold. The dividend is held at half from 2006 to 2013. Minas-Rio is bought and built as it was, because a house that holds the cycle also makes mistakes at the top of it. De Beers is bought from the family as it was, because buying the diamonds when the family sells them is what the method says to do; what the house did with them afterwards is another matter, and Section XI takes it up. The money those two abstentions free is spent, at the market's own prices, on the minorities of the companies the house already controlled and on the one gold company it had let slip. A thirty per cent premium is charged on every purchase. No synergy is counted, no dividend received in the interval is counted, and two timings are priced: the method applied in the years the boards actually acted, at the top, and the method applied as a house applies it, at the bottoms of 2008–09 and 2013.THE RULEI. Four rules, and what they would have meant in the chairErnest Oppenheimer never wrote a strategy. He wrote one sentence, in 1954, about profits earned 'in such a way as to make a real and permanent contribution' to Southern Africa, and he left one rule about diamonds, that the only way to make a stone valuable is to make it scarce. The rest he built rather than wrote: gold, diamonds, platinum, coal, copper and industry under one roof, with a finance arm to move money between them, so that whichever metal was out of favour could be carried by whichever was not, and bought from those who could not carry it. Harry ran the house that way for twenty-five years, through Sharpeville, Soweto and the state of emergency, and bought when others sold. A chief executive who had absorbed that record would have carried four rules into the office. Never sell the asset that is out of favour, because that is the day the house exists for. Never buy your own paper, because a mining house that can find no ground to buy has stopped being a mining house. Consolidate what you already control before you buy what you do not understand. And where the house owns enough of a metal to matter, set the price, because a custodian who lets the buyer name the price of what he owns has given up the one thing De Beers was built to do.The first three rules can be priced, and the next nine sections price them. The fourth cannot, and Section XI says why it has to be stated anyway. What follows is written as if a competent chief executive, steeped in that method, had held the office from the strategic review of April 2006 to the present, with the same facts in front of him that Trahar, Carroll, Cutifani and Wanblad had, and had applied the rules and nothing else.Never sell what is out of favour. Never buy your own paper. Consolidate what you control before you buy what you do not understand. Set the price of what you own enough of. Four rules, applied to the same cash in the same years.THE CASH THEY HADII. Where the money went, 2004 to 2013Between 2004 and 2013 the boards of Trahar and Carroll had about US$31 billion to deploy over and above what the mines needed, and the table says where it went. The gold shares brought in US$6.4 billion. The buybacks took US$10.5 billion, all of it between February 2006 and the suspension of February 2009, at an average of US$49.50 a share that the shares would not see again for a decade. Dividends over the ten years came to about US$10.5 billion, with a special dividend in 2006 for good measure. Minas-Rio cost US$4.65 billion to buy and De Beers US$5.2 billion. Net debt, which had been US$3.3 billion at the end of 2006, was US$11 billion two years later, and that debt is the hinge of the whole story: it is what forced the sales at the bottom in 2009, 2015 and 2016, and it is the first thing the method removes..Sources and uses, actual and under the method. Market values from companiesmarketcap.com year-end series (AngloGold US$13.0bn end-2006, US$11.9bn end-2007, US$9.9bn end-2008; Gold Fields US$2.4bn end-2013; Sibanye about US$0.9bn), Anglo Platinum's 2008 report (237.1m shares; Anglo at 76.5% in 2007 and 79.6% in 2008) and JSE prices (about R1,150 at end-2007, about R470 at end-2008, at R6.85 and R9.30 to the dollar), Kumba at about R50bn at end-2008 with Anglo at 63 per cent. Dividends from Anglo American's declarations 2004–13. A 30 per cent premium on every purchase. Author's arithmetic..Two things in that table settle the rest. The first is that the method applied with the boards' own timing, buying the gold and platinum minorities in 2006 and 2007 when the boards were placing shares instead, costs about US$27 billion and carries net debt of about US$27 billion into 2010. It is the fair reading of 'what if they had consolidated instead of buying back', it would have survived, because Anglo paid US$11 billion of debt down to US$1.4 billion in two years on the cash flow of 2010–11, and it ends in the same company. But it is not what a house does. A house does not buy at the top at all. It cancels the buyback in 2006, pays half the dividend, holds its gold, and waits. In the last quarter of 2008, with AngloGold at a third of its 2006 price, Amplats at a third of its 2007 price and Kumba down by half, it buys all three sets of minorities for about US$13 billion with the premium, which is within a few hundred million dollars of what the boards had spent on their own shares eighteen months earlier at the top. The whole programme, with Gold Fields in 2013, costs about US$17 billion. The buybacks not made and the dividend held at half pay US$14.5 billion of it; the rest is debt, and it is carrying a mine..The same money, spent two ways. The boards deployed about US$31 billion of discretionary cash between 2004 and 2013, US$10.5 billion of it on their own shares at the top. The method deploys about US$33 billion of the same money and ends up owning all of AngloGold, all of Amplats, all of Kumba, all of Gold Fields and Sibanye's mines..WHAT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN SOLDIII. The parcels that stay, and what each is worth todayThe first rule asks nothing of a chief executive except that he sit on his hands, which makes it the easiest to apply and the most damning to have broken. Every parcel of gold, platinum and coal the four boards sold went because it was out of favour, and out of favour is the one condition under which the method forbids a sale. The table lists them with what each is worth at the 22 October 2026 close. Nothing in the right-hand column required the house to be clever. It required the house to do nothing..What abstention alone would have kept: the value on 22 October 2026 of each parcel the boards sold or gave away, at the closes of that day. The sum is the US$37 billion Part One calls 'what Anglo let go'. Sources as in Part One..Thirty-seven billion dollars is the price of a chief executive who could not sit still, and the figure flatters him. It leaves out the US$1.2 billion of dividends the AngloGold shares have paid their new owners, the Gold Fields dividends, the Sibanye shares that fell into Gold Fields holders' laps in 2013, Thungela's R22 billion, and the platinum dividends of 2021 and 2022, when Amplats paid out more in two years than in the previous ten. It leaves out the US$10.5 billion of buyback money that would still be in the house, and the interest on it. And it leaves out the thing the method was for, which is the next section: the money not spent on the company's own shares, spent instead on the ground the house already half owned. WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN BOUGHTIV. Consolidating what the house already controlledIn 2006 Anglo American controlled, without owning outright, the largest gold company in the world, the largest platinum producer in the world and the largest iron-ore producer in Africa. It held 42 per cent of AngloGold Ashanti after the first placing, about three-quarters of Anglo Platinum and 63 per cent of Kumba Iron Ore. Each minority was a claim on earnings the house had found, sunk and managed, held by shareholders who had paid nothing for the finding, and each could be bought in the ordinary way, with a premium and a scheme of arrangement. The second and third rules point at those minorities before anything else: buy your own ground before you buy a stranger's, and buy it when it is cheap. The boards did the reverse. They bought the one thing that gives a house no more ground than it had, its own paper, at the top, and then bought a stranger's iron-ore project in Brazil from a promoter.AngloGold first. At the end of 2006 the whole company was worth US$13.0 billion and at the end of 2007 US$11.9 billion, so the 58 per cent the house did not own would have cost about US$9.4 billion with a thirty per cent premium in the years the boards were placing shares instead. In the last quarter of 2008, after the crash, the whole company was worth US$9.9 billion and the 58 per cent about US$7.5 billion with the premium. That is the quarter in which Anglo's board was preparing to sell its last 39.9 million shares to John Paulson at US$32. A house following the method stands on the other side of that trade: it is the buyer of the 58 per cent, from funds that have to sell, at the price Paulson paid. The scheme closes in the first half of 2009 with gold at nine hundred dollars. The house then owns the whole of a company that mined 4.6 million ounces that year, including every South African mine that AngloGold would otherwise sell to Harmony over the next eleven years, and it never sells them, because a house does not sell Mponeng for two hundred million dollars at the bottom of anything.Amplats second, and this is the purchase the four boards would find hardest to explain, because the house had been at three-quarters for a generation and the boards themselves took it from 76.5 to 79.6 per cent in 2008 without finishing the job. At the end of 2007 Amplats was worth about R270 billion, US$40 billion, and the quarter the house did not own would have cost about US$12 billion with the premium, more than the whole buyback, which is why the 'same years' version strains the balance sheet. At the end of 2008 Amplats was worth about R110 billion, US$12 billion, and the fifth the house still did not own would have cost about US$3.2 billion. Amplats had paid its shareholders R12.3 billion of dividends in 2007 and R13.8 billion in 2008, and the minorities took a fifth to a quarter of that, three billion rand a year, for owning a slice of mines the house ran. Buying them in the last quarter of 2008 for US$3.2 billion recovers that leakage within a decade on the 2007–08 run-rate alone, and it means that in 2025 there is no Valterra to demerge and no 19.9 per cent to place at R845 eleven weeks before the price went vertical. The house owns the whole of the largest platinum producer on earth through the 2026 half-year in which it earned R33 billion.Kumba third, and briefly, because Kumba is the one asset the boards got right by keeping it, and the method only finishes what they started. Anglo held 63 per cent at the end of 2008, when the whole company was worth about R50 billion, US$5.3 billion, and the 37 per cent minority would have cost about US$2.5 billion with the premium. Kumba has paid a dividend every year since; the minorities' share of them over seventeen years is several times that price. The house that buys all three sets of minorities in the last quarter of 2008 spends about US$13 billion, which is the buyback money, and comes out of the crisis owning outright the three best businesses it had, instead of 99 million of its own shares parked in three charitable trusts.Gold Fields last, and later, because the method buys when the market is giving things away and Gold Fields was not cheap until 2013. The house has kept its fifth from 2004, so it is the largest shareholder throughout. When Nick Holland unbundles Kloof, Driefontein and Beatrix into Sibanye in February 2013 at a first-day value of about US$900 million, and the gold crash of that spring takes Gold Fields itself from US$8.95 billion to US$2.4 billion by the year's end, the house is the obvious buyer of both. The 80 per cent of Gold Fields it does not own costs about US$2.5 billion with the premium and the whole of Sibanye about US$1.1 billion: US$3.6 billion for South Deep, Tarkwa, St Ives, Agnew, Damang, Cerro Corona, Kloof, Driefontein and Beatrix, paid from a dividend held at half since 2010. On 22 October 2026 Gold Fields alone was worth US$31.3 billion. The house now owns, under one roof, AngloGold, Gold Fields and the old GFSA mines: every large gold mine in the Witwatersrand basin, the Ghanaian and Australian mines of both companies, and Cripple Creek and the Boddington stake before AngloGold sold them. In 2013 that is about 7.5 million ounces a year, level with Barrick for the largest gold producer on earth, and the house has paid about US$11 billion for the part of it that it did not already own..The four consolidations under the method, at the prices the market offered at the bottoms of 2008–09 and 2013, and what the same holdings are worth on 22 October 2026. Sources: companiesmarketcap.com year-end values; Anglo Platinum annual report 2008; JSE price history; Gold Fields and Sibanye announcements, 2013. Author's arithmetic..Seventeen billion dollars, most of it the buyback money, bought at the bottom what is worth sixty-one billion today. The boards spent the same money on their own shares, and the shares are worth less than they paid.THE DEBTV. How the balance sheet carries itThe treasurer's objection is the balance sheet, so here is the path, year by year, with nothing hidden. The boards took net debt from US$3.3 billion at the end of 2006 to US$11 billion at the end of 2008 by spending US$10.5 billion on buybacks and US$4.65 billion on Minas-Rio against US$6.4 billion of gold proceeds. Under the method there are no buybacks and no gold proceeds, the dividend is halved, and the house pays its share of AngloGold's 2008 rights issue, about US$0.7 billion. It enters the last quarter of 2008 with net debt of about US$4 billion and the same Minas-Rio obligation. The three consolidations of that quarter cost about US$13 billion, and with the Paulson parcel never sold the house ends 2009 owing about US$18 billion against the actual US$11.3 billion. That is a real difference and I do not wave it away: about two and a half times the 2009 EBITDA of a company that had just suspended its dividend, and a rating agency would have had something to say about it.Three things carry it. The first is what the boards themselves did next: Anglo paid net debt down from US$11.3 billion at the end of 2009 to US$1.4 billion at the end of 2011 out of operating cash flow, because the recovery of 2010 and 2011 was the strongest in a generation. The same cash flow, with the whole of AngloGold's, Amplats' and Kumba's free cash inside the house rather than two-fifths, four-fifths and two-thirds of it, retires most of the extra seven billion by the end of 2011 and the rest during 2012, before the De Beers cheque. The second is the dividend, suspended in 2009 under the method as it was in fact, and held at half when it resumes, so the house keeps about US$2 billion more than the boards did over 2010–13. The third is that the assets bought pay. AngloGold paid roughly US$200 million a year in dividends in 2010–12; Kumba has paid every year, and its 2011–12 payouts alone were R27 billion; Amplats, thin in 2009–10, returned to large payouts later and paid its shareholders more than R80 billion in 2021 and 2022, a fifth of which, under the method, comes home rather than leaking to minorities. By the time Gold Fields comes up at the end of 2013 the house is at about US$14 billion of net debt against the actual US$10.7 billion, with three wholly owned subsidiaries the actual history never had, and Gold Fields' US$3.6 billion is paid from the dividend saving and a year of their cash. The 2015–16 downturn is then faced with a little more debt than the boards faced and a great deal more earnings, because the platinum and gold are the house's own; Rustenburg is not sold at the bottom, because the house does not need Sibanye's R1.5 billion. Woodsmith is still bought, because the method confers no foresight, and it is still written down.Seven billion more debt at the end of 2009, every dollar of it carrying a mine instead of a treasury share, and gone by 2012 on the cash flow the boards actually had.THE HOUSE AT EACH DATEVI. What the company looks like in 2009, 2013, 2016, 2021 and 2025Stand at the end of 2009 and look at it. The house owns all of AngloGold Ashanti, with Mponeng, TauTona, Savuka, Moab Khotsong, Great Noligwa, Kopanang, Tau Lekoa and the Vaal River surface business still inside it, together with Geita, Obuasi, Iduapriem, Siguiri, Sadiola, Morila, Sunrise Dam, Cerro Vanguardia, Cripple Creek and the Boddington stake; all of Anglo Platinum; all of Kumba; the Queensland and South African coal; Minas-Rio half built; 45 per cent of De Beers; and a fifth of Gold Fields. It has handed Mondi to its shareholders, which was right, and sold Tongaat and Hulamin, which was well timed. It owes about US$18 billion and it has never bought one of its own shares. Mark Cutifani, then running AngloGold, is the chief executive of a subsidiary rather than a candidate from outside.In 2012 the house buys the Oppenheimers' 40 per cent of De Beers, as it did, for US$5.2 billion, and carries it. In 2013 it buys the rest of Gold Fields and all of Sibanye, and its gold division is now AngloGold, Gold Fields, Kloof, Driefontein and Beatrix: about 7.5 million ounces a year, every large mine in the Witwatersrand basin, and the largest gold producer in the world alongside Barrick. In 2016, cut to junk with the rest of the sector, it sells the niobium, the phosphates and the Lafarge stake as it did, but not Rustenburg, because the platinum earnings are now wholly its own and R1.5 billion is not a price for mines. In 2018 AngloGold, as a subsidiary, does not sell Moab Khotsong to Harmony, and in 2020 it does not sell Mponeng; the subsidiary's chief executive, whoever he is, does not get to call the deepest mine on earth non-core, because the parent's rule is that it is the core. Thungela is demerged in 2021 on climate grounds, which the method does not forbid, but it is demerged at a valuation, not with a cheque attached, and the house keeps a third. In 2024 BHP arrives. The board that owns all of AngloGold, Gold Fields and Amplats does not receive a £38.6 billion offer; it receives one for a company worth something nearer double that, or it receives none, because BHP cannot afford it. There is no Valterra demerger in 2025 and no placing at R845. The platinum earnings of the 2026 half-year, R33 billion, are the house's..The house at each date under the method, against the actual at the start. Holdings from Anglo American annual reports 2006–2025 and the transaction announcements in Part One. Net debt from the results; the method's figures are the author's..WHAT IT IS WORTH TODAYVII. The valuation, line by line, on 22 October 2026The valuation adds to Anglo American as it is the value of everything the method keeps and everything it buys, each at the close of 22 October 2026, with nothing counted twice. Anglo as it is, US$52.0 billion, already contains Kumba, Minas-Rio, Quellaveco, the copper and De Beers at the price now being discussed, and it is the base. AngloGold, wholly owned, is the whole company at that day's value, US$43.1 billion; the 42 per cent Anglo once held is inside that figure and is not added again. The South African mines AngloGold never sold are valued at what they are worth inside Harmony today, three-fifths of Harmony's production profit applied to its US$10.2 billion, US$6.1 billion; AngloGold's US$43.1 billion does not contain them, so they are added. Gold Fields, wholly owned, is US$31.3 billion, and Sibanye's three gold mines are the Introduction Paper's sum-of-parts for that division, US$1.3 billion. Valterra, wholly owned and never demerged, is US$18.5 billion, and the 51 per cent demerged and the 19.9 per cent placed are inside it. Rustenburg, never sold, is a quarter of Sibanye, US$1.6 billion. Thungela is counted at its whole value of US$1.2 billion, which overstates the third kept and understates the dividends by more. The Kumba minorities are the 30 per cent Anglo still does not own, US$1.3 billion. Mondi is excluded, because it was delivered to shareholders and the method would have done the same. De Beers is neutral: held rather than sold, at about the value the sale implies..The house on 22 October 2026, built line by line: US$52 billion as it is, US$104 billion of what the method keeps and buys, about US$156 billion in all, with BHP, China Shenhua and Rio Tinto marked..The sum is about US$156 billion, and the kind of number it is matters as much as its size. It is nominal, at one day's prices, and it counts no dividend received between purchase and valuation on any line: not the US$1.2 billion the AngloGold shares have paid, not Thungela's R22 billion, not the fifth of R80 billion that Amplats paid in 2021 and 2022, not Kumba's seventeen years, not Gold Fields' US$2.5 billion. Count those and the house is comfortably past US$170 billion. It charges no synergy, although a company that owned AngloGold, Gold Fields and Sibanye's mines in one basin would have closed three head offices and four plants. It assumes the house ran each business no better than its actual owners did, which for the South African gold mines is a conservative assumption, since Harmony ran them better than AngloGold had and the house could have hired Harmony's people. And it assumes the gold price of 22 October 2026, which is where the bear will stand, and where the next section meets him..Third in the world, where it is fourteenth. The league table at the 22 October 2026 close with the method's Anglo placed on it at US$156 billion, and at US$130 billion if gold were US$3,000..On the league table of 22 October 2026 the house is third: behind BHP at US$197 billion and China Shenhua at US$160 billion, a whisker ahead of Southern Copper at US$155 billion and well clear of Rio Tinto at US$137 billion. Its gold division alone, US$82 billion, is second only to Newmont by value and level with Newmont in ounces, and it is the largest platinum producer on earth, and it still owns the diamonds. It is run from Johannesburg, because a house that owns the Witwatersrand, the Bushveld and the Northern Cape does not move its head office to the country of a copper company it has merged with; the Teck merger, if it happened at all, would have happened the other way round. The actual Anglo American is fourteenth, behind a royalty company with forty employees, with its gold in Denver, its platinum in other hands, its diamonds for sale at a twelfth of what it paid, and its head office on its way to Vancouver.About US$156 billion, third in the world, a gold division the size of Newmont's, run from Johannesburg. The actual company is US$52 billion, fourteenth, and leaving.SENSITIVITIESVIII. What moves the number, and by how muchThe premium does not move it. At twenty per cent the four consolidations cost about US$15.5 billion and at forty per cent about US$18 billion; the value today is the same either way, because the value is what the assets are worth now, not what was paid for them. The timing moves the cost and not the value: the 'same years' version pays US$27 billion for what the house version pays US$17 billion for, carries about ten billion more debt into 2010, and ends in the same place. The dividend moves the debt: a dividend paid in full rather than at half needs about US$4 billion more borrowing over 2006–13, which the cash flow of 2010–11 also retires, a year or so later. None of those changes the rank.The gold price moves it, and that is the right place for the bear to stand. About half of the US$156 billion is gold: AngloGold, Gold Fields, the ex-AngloGold mines inside Harmony and Sibanye's gold division, US$82 billion between them at a gold price of about US$4,040. If gold were US$3,000, which it last was in the spring of 2025, those four lines would be worth about thirty per cent less, with the leverage a gold equity carries to its metal, about US$57 billion, and the house about US$130 billion: fifth in the world, between Rio Tinto and Newmont, still two and a half times the actual Anglo. If gold were US$2,000, which it last was in 2023, the gold lines would be worth perhaps US$35 billion and the house about US$108 billion, seventh, ahead of Freeport, still double the actual. There is no gold price in the last decade at which the method's Anglo is worth less than the real one, because the real one sold its gold at prices from four hundred to nine hundred dollars and gold has not been back there since. Platinum moves it less, because Valterra is US$18.5 billion of the total, and the copper and iron ore are the same in both companies..Sensitivities. The gold lines are AngloGold Ashanti, Gold Fields, the ex-AngloGold mines inside Harmony and Sibanye's gold division, scaled with the gold price and the leverage gold equities carry to it; the rest of the house is Anglo as it is plus Valterra, Rustenburg, Thungela and the Kumba minorities, held constant. Ranks from the 22 October 2026 league table. Author's arithmetic..THE SHAREHOLDER'S ANSWERIX. What the shareholders got, both waysThe fairest objection to everything above is the shareholder's, and it deserves its own section rather than a line in the next one. Part Two has priced two companies by their market value on one day, and market value is not what a shareholder lives on. The real Anglo paid out. It paid US$30.2 billion in dividends and US$12.8 billion in buybacks since the London listing, and it handed its owners the shares of Mondi, Thungela and most of Valterra, which they could keep or sell. A holder who sat through the whole cycle did not end up with US$52 billion of market value and nothing else; he ended up with the market value and twenty-seven years of cheques. The method's Anglo, by contrast, held a dividend at half for eight years, bought nothing back, and kept Thungela and Valterra inside the house. So the honest comparison is total return, value plus everything paid out, on both sides, and the chart draws it..What the shareholders got, both ways. Everything the shareholder body has received since the London listing, as it happened and under the method: market value on 22 October 2026 plus every dividend, buyback and demerged share, nominal, against the US$27 billion the company was worth at its first London year-end..As it happened, the shareholders have about US$112 billion to show for twenty-seven years: US$52 billion of market value, US$30 billion of dividends, US$13 billion of buyback cash, and about US$16 billion of demerged shares and the dividends those shares have paid since. Under the method they would have about US$187 billion: US$156 billion of market value, US$26 billion of dividends, which is every dividend the real company paid less the US$4 billion held back in 2006–13, and Mondi, which the method demerges as the boards did. The method pays out less in cash, by about US$17 billion, and leaves the shareholder US$75 billion better off, because the US$17 billion it kept bought what is now worth US$61 billion and the dividends the real company paid were, in the years that mattered, paid out of the proceeds of the gold.Two things in that arithmetic lean against the method rather than for it. The first is the dividend. A house that owned the whole of AngloGold, Amplats, Kumba and Gold Fields from 2013 would have had their entire cash flow to distribute, and the Amplats payouts of 2021 and 2022 alone, more than R80 billion to all shareholders, would have been the house's to pass on; the chart gives the method's Anglo the real company's dividends and not a cent more. The second is the buyback, which is counted at face value as money returned, when a buyback at US$49.50 returns money only to the shareholder who sells and leaves the one who stays holding a larger share of a smaller company. The holder through the cycle, the one this section is about, saw none of the US$12.8 billion; it went to the people who left. Take the buyback out of his column and the real company gave him about US$99 billion, and the method about US$187 billion, which is where the fourteenth-against-third gap in market value reappears, almost undiminished, in the only number a shareholder keeps..Total return to the shareholder body, both ways, nominal. Sources: Anglo American results 1999–2026; closes of 22 October 2026; Thungela dividend history; Section VII for the method's market value. The method's dividends are the real company's less the US$4 billion held back; the dividends the method's wholly owned subsidiaries would have passed up are not counted. Author's arithmetic.Value plus every cheque: US$112 billion as it happened, US$187 billion under the method. The real company paid out more cash and left its owners US$75 billion poorer, because the cash it paid out was the gold..THE OBJECTIONSX. What the four boards would say, and the answerThey would say, first, that minorities cannot be bought at the bottom, because the bottom is when nobody has money. The house had the money, because it had not spent it on its own shares; that is the whole purpose of the first two rules. Anglo found US$10.5 billion for buybacks in 2006–08. The method finds the same US$10.5 billion eighteen months later and spends it on something else. The only thing the house needed in the last quarter of 2008 was a board that had not already spent the cash, and that is a decision, not a market condition.They would say, second, that a scheme of arrangement for AngloGold's minorities in early 2009, in the worst credit market in seventy years, would have failed or been blocked. Perhaps the first attempt. But the house was the largest shareholder, the price was a third of what the same shares had fetched two years before, and the sellers were funds that needed cash; and had it failed in 2009 it would have succeeded in 2013, when AngloGold was worth US$4.7 billion and the 58 per cent would have cost US$3.5 billion. The method is patient. The boards were not, which is why they were on the wrong side of the trade in both years.They would say, third, that a wholly owned AngloGold and Gold Fields would have been run worse than the independent companies that went to New York and Perth and quadrupled. Possibly. But the quadrupling was the gold price, which the house would have owned all of, and the South African mines the two companies sold or gave away are worth ten times inside Harmony and Sibanye what either company received for them, which is the clearest evidence in this ledger that the independent companies ran the South African ground worse than a house would have. The house would also have had, in 2013, the one answer to AngloGold's failed split that nobody at AngloGold could give: it would not have needed one.They would say, fourth, that political risk justified leaving South African gold and platinum. Part One has met this with the dates: the sales began before the nationalisation debate and continued for thirteen years after the ANC dropped it, and the buyers who took the other side of the political bet were South African companies that stayed and are now worth more than Anglo. The method's answer is shorter. Harry Oppenheimer stayed through Sharpeville and the state of emergency and bought. A house that leaves at the first talk of nationalisation is following the opposite of his rule.They would say, fifth, that this is hindsight, because nobody in 2008 knew gold would be four thousand dollars. Conceded, and the sensitivities are there for that reason: at two thousand dollars the method's Anglo is still double the real one, because the real one sold at four hundred to nine hundred. But the method asks for no view on the gold price. It asks only that a house which has just been handed gold, platinum and iron ore at a third of the price of eighteen months before, with the cash in hand, buys rather than sells. The four boards sold. They did not need foresight to do otherwise. They needed the founder's rule, which was on the wall.THE PRICEXI. The fourth rule: passiveness is not a strategyEverything above can be priced because it is about ownership, and ownership has a market value on a given day. The fourth rule is about price, and it cannot be priced, which is why it is stated here on its own, and emphatically, rather than folded into the sum. Ernest Oppenheimer's De Beers was not valuable for owning diamond mines; Botswana and Russia own diamond mines. It was valuable because from 1934 it sold most of the world's rough through one channel at prices it set, and held stock off the market when demand fell, so that the stone stayed scarce and the price held through the Depression, the war and the Soviet entry. That is the function the family performed for eighty years and the listed company gave up in two steps: in 2000, when De Beers abandoned the single channel for 'supplier of choice' and let the price find its own level, and after 2012, when the professionals who had just paid the family US$5.2 billion carried the diamonds at full value for eleven years while a laboratory stone took the engagement-ring market and nobody in the house lifted a finger for the price of the natural one. Keeping De Beers was consistent with the method. Letting the market set the price of a thing the house owned most of was the reverse of it, and it is the part of the De Beers story the ledger cannot score, because the counterfactual is a price that was never defended.I put no number on what a defended diamond price would have been worth, and nobody should. What can be said is that the company bought the custodian's chair for US$5.2 billion and then declined to sit in it, and that a chief executive steeped in the method would have understood that the chair was the asset and the mines were the furniture. The same applies, with more force and with the arithmetic already done, to platinum. Under the method the house owns the whole of Anglo Platinum from 2008, the largest producer of a metal of which South Africa holds 83 per cent of the world's reserves, in a country whose law, as The Richest Beggar on Earth set out in the first book, offers eight lawful instruments by which the owner of that ground can stop taking the price it is shown: a Johannesburg price venue, an export consortium for the minor metals under the block exemption, a sovereign reserve that holds metal off the market around cost, a variable export duty on concentrate, security-for-price collars, a regional compact with Zimbabwe, demand creation, and a golden share in refining. None of them asks the house to do anything Ernest did not do with diamonds in 1934. A house that owned all of Amplats and sat on the Bushveld with Impala and Northam as the only other producers that mattered was the natural convener of every one of them, and the platinum price that sat at US$1,000 for a decade while the house sold its mines into it was, in large part, the price of nobody convening anything.Passiveness is not a strategy, and I say it without hedging. The four boards treated the price of gold, platinum and diamonds as weather, to be forecast or endured, and the ledger shows what forecasting it cost them. The founder treated the price of the one metal he controlled as a thing the custodian sets, and his company was the most valuable mining house in the world for seventy years on the strength of it. The method's Anglo, with the whole of Amplats, the whole of AngloGold and Gold Fields and the diamonds, would have been the custodian of three of the four precious metals, and a competent chief executive would have used the chair. The value of that sits on top of the US$156 billion, not inside it, and it is the only line in Part Two whose size I cannot state and whose sign I have no doubt about.PULL QUOTE: The company bought the custodian's chair for US$5.2 billion and declined to sit in it. Passiveness is not a strategy, and the owner of 83 per cent of a metal's reserves does not have to take the price it is shown.THE VERDICTXII. The opportunity, and who squandered itA competent chief executive steeped in the Oppenheimer method would have done four things the four boards did not, and nothing they did except the two mistakes I leave in to be fair. He would not have bought one share of the company's own paper, in any year, at any price, because a mining house that buys its own shares has announced that it can find no ground to buy, and the ground was all around it. He would not have sold a share of AngloGold or Gold Fields, or a tonne of platinum or coal, in a year in which it was out of favour, because that is the year the house exists to hold it. With the money those two abstentions freed, and a little debt, he would have bought at the bottoms of 2008–09 and 2013 the parts of AngloGold, Anglo Platinum, Kumba and Gold Fields that the house did not already own, because the first duty of a house is to own what it controls. Minas-Rio he would have bought and regretted, as they did. De Beers he would have bought from the family, as they did, and then done the one thing they did not: sat in the custodian's chair and defended the price, of the diamonds and of the platinum, with the instruments the law and the house's own history put in his hands.That company, on 22 October 2026, is worth about US$156 billion before a cent of the dividends it would have collected: third in the world, a gold division the size of Newmont's, the largest platinum producer on earth, the diamonds still in the house and the head office still in Johannesburg. The real company is worth US$52 billion, fourteenth, with its gold in Denver, its platinum placed thirteen months before the price went vertical, its diamonds for sale at a twelfth of what it paid, and its head office bound for Vancouver, and it paid its four chief executives about £150 million for the difference. The difference is a hundred billion dollars, and it is not luck and not the gold price, because the method wins at every gold price of the last decade. It is four rules, written down or lived by the man who built the house, that the people who inherited it did not read. That is what a squandered opportunity looks like when it is priced: not a mine that failed, or a bet that went wrong, but a house that was handed the best ground on three continents and the rule for holding it, and chose its own paper instead.NO BUYBACKS. NO GOLD SALES. THE DIVIDEND AT HALF. THE MINORITIES OF ANGLOGOLD, AMPLATS, KUMBA AND GOLD FIELDS BOUGHT AT THE BOTTOM FOR ABOUT US$17 BILLION, MOST OF IT THE BUYBACK MONEY. MINAS-RIO AND DE BEERS LEFT AS THEY WERE.THAT HOUSE IS WORTH ABOUT US$156 BILLION ON 22 OCTOBER 2026, THIRD IN THE WORLD, WITH A GOLD DIVISION THE SIZE OF NEWMONT'S, BEFORE A CENT OF THE DIVIDENDS IT WOULD HAVE COLLECTED. THE REAL COMPANY IS WORTH US$52 BILLION AND IS FOURTEENTH. COUNTING EVERY DIVIDEND, BUYBACK AND DEMERGED SHARE, THE SHAREHOLDERS GOT ABOUT US$112 BILLION FROM THE REAL COMPANY AND WOULD HAVE HAD ABOUT US$187 BILLION FROM THE OTHER. AT A GOLD PRICE OF US$2,000 THE HOUSE WOULD STILL BE DOUBLE THE REAL ONE. A HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS WAS SQUANDERED BY PEOPLE WHO HAD THE FOUNDER'S RULES ON THE WALL, AND THE FOURTH RULE, THAT THE CUSTODIAN SETS THE PRICE, IS WORTH MORE THAN THE SUM AND CANNOT BE COUNTED..Read Anglo American's right of reply below.Anglo American has evolved throughout its long history, from its origins investing in gold mining to a multi-industry conglomerate, and now to a focused global metals and minerals company with one of the world’s best copper growth portfolios.This position will be further enhanced through our planned merger with Teck, all aligned with Anglo American’s strategy to focus on those commodities in which we have high-quality assets and clear competitive advantage – copper, premium iron ore and crop nutrients. Looking back at that evolution, it is Anglo American’s shareholders – a large number of which are South Africans – who have benefited considerably from both their shareholding in Anglo American as well as the companies that we have demerged – Valterra Platinum being just the most recent.Looking further back, Anglo American has played a part in creating numerous other successful standalone South African companies, including the likes of African Rainbow Minerals, Seriti, Thungela and Exxaro, as well as many other companies in other sectors, such as Mondi.

Duarte Da Silva: The destructIon of Anglo American

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