Nothing predestined Robert Friedland, the son of Holocaust survivors born in 1950 in Chicago, Illinois, to become a major copper player. Born into a working-class family, the eldest of three siblings wanted to escape his background from an early age.

It was more than 1,500km from where he grew up, in Summitville, Colorado, that the president and founder of Ivanhoe Capital – a family holding company dedicated to financing international projects created in Singapore in 1987 – stumbled into gold.

In the mid-1980s, the young entrepreneur lured investors into a small mining company, Galactic Resources Ltd, by promising them “historic” returns and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold from the Summitville open-pit mine in the Rocky Mountains, western United States.

Giants such as Bank of America got in on the act, and some $30m was raised. America’s leading construction company, Bechtel Corporation, agreed to take charge of engineering and construction.

The deal impressed the US mining industry, but its success was short-lived: Friedland was prosecuted for violating the region’s environmental laws and ended his tenure as head of Galactic Resources in 1990. The company had gone bankrupt with a bang.

Big bet on Mongolian copper

Three years later, it was in Toronto that Robert Friedland bounced back, registering his new mining, development and exploration company Ivanhoe Mines. He worked on obtaining new international permits and strengthening his pool of partners and investors. The financier, who became Canadian in the late 1980s, first launched his assault on copper in the early 2000s in Mongolia at the Oyu Tolgoï deposit in the Gobi desert.

Located around 100km from the Chinese border, far from the Mongolian steppes, this hitherto unexploited deposit of red metal is now one of the world’s largest mines and one of the businessman’s greatest successes.

By betting on the Oyu deposit, Robert Friedland paid out less than $5m to buy the mining licences from Australian multinational BHP Group. Along with its multinational partner Rio Tinto, Ivanhoe would spend more than $2.5bn over 10 years. It was a gamble that paid off handsomely and established him as one of the most powerful men in the mining sector. By 2012, when Rio Tinto was preparing to take it over, Ivanhoe Mines was worth around $13bn on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Chinese partnerships

“He’s not afraid of a challenge, he’s an extremely well-connected multi-billionaire who relies on a large number of networks,” a mining specialist tells The Africa Report. “For the Americans, he’s an interesting man, because he positions himself between China and the US since he can work with the Chinese,” says this source.

Friedland, who presents himself on his investment company’s website wearing a chapka on his blond head while perched atop a Mongolian camel, is today very close to the directors of China International Trust and Investment Corporation (CITIC). In 2019, the Chinese state fund invested more than $450m in Ivanhoe Mines, in which it holds a 25.97% stake. It also joined forces with China’s Zijin Mining to raise the billion dollars needed to exploit the Kamoa-Kakula copper deposit in Lualaba (south), whose resources are estimated to be worth at least $10bn. This marked the start of his African adventure.

Banking on Tshisekedi’s support

When he arrived in the DRC in the early 2000s, Friedland relied on the methods he had put in place elsewhere, and his management style set him apart. Relentlessly running the day-to-day business of his mining companies is not his style. Instead, he has placed trusted women at the top: Marna Cloete at Ivanhoe Mines and Bronwyn Barnes at High Power Exploration (HPX, which specialises in iron ore extraction in Guinea). However, the boss still stays in touch with his teams via videoconference.

He has also taken the time to build strong relationships with the leaders of the countries in which he’s invested. For example, to accelerate the development of his DRC copper project, which was discovered in 2009 and will come on stream in 2021, he has nurtured his relationships with the Congolese president’s entourage. In 2019, during President Félix Tshisekedi’s first visit to the US, Pacifique Kahasha, the president’s chargé d’affaires, introduced the two men.

It was after this meeting that the project to exploit the copper and cobalt reserves in the Kamoa-Kakula mines fell into the president’s lap. Some of Tshisekedi’s advisers were involved, including Dany Banza, Fortunat Biselele, who was then the president’s private adviser, and Théophas Mahuku (a close associate of the Congolese company Sud South, which had a contract with the Lualaba governorate to manage its trading centre in Musompo, the country’s most strategic mining province). At the same time, Friedland was nurturing his relationship with Lualaba Governor Fifi Masuka Saini, whom President Tshisekedi had spoken highly of.

In the DRC, Friedland counted on the support of his friend, informal adviser and HPX board of directors president, Republican John Peter Pham. A close friend of former US President Donald Trump, during the Trump administration, Pham was US special envoy to the Great Lakes region (2018-2020) and then to the Sahel (2020-2021), and was one of several close advisers whispering in the mining magnate’s ear.

Well-known in Africa’s power corridors, he has taken part in all of Friedland’s trips to the continent. He also advised the US government on the Lobito corridor, which is used by Ivanhoe Mines to transport copper from Kamoa-Kakula.

Takeover of Mt. Nimba with Condé’s backing

While the billionaire’s activities were flourishing in the DRC, the Guinean adventure remained, without question, the real challenge for Friedland, in what was to him a completely unknown region. Until that point, Friedland had only experienced West Africa from his plush Singapore villa or his London flat, through the eyes of his son, Govind Friedland.

A geologist by training, Govind bought the Madaouela uranium mine in the Agadez region of Niger in 2015. With a production capacity of 50.8m pounds of triuranium octoxide over 19 years, this mine is one of the world’s largest uranium resources currently under development. Goviex, which controls 80% of the project, says the mine will start production by 2025.

It was around the same time that the mining guru gradually showed an interest in Guinean iron. “In reality, he began to take an interest in Guinea when discussions were underway for BHP to take over the Zogota iron deposit in 2014,” says a former aide to President Alpha Condé. But the site’s extraction capacity – 10m tonnes per year, a low reserve compared with other Guinean iron mines – prompted Friedland to finally distance himself from the deal, sparking an open war that ended in a legal dispute involving Condé and Franco-Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz.

It was not until 2019 that Friedland embarked on his iron adventure. Wishing to sell his assets, he was the perfect buyer for Euro Nimba, made up of BHP Group, Orano and Newmont Mining. The latter were fully aware of the qualities of this successful investor and his track record in the industry. “Euro Nimba chose HPX and submitted it to the Guinean government for approval. He said Friedland was a credible investor and that it was already developing a copper business in the DRC through Ivanhoe Mines,” says our source in Guinea’s former presidential circle.

The Euro Nimba “guarantee” reassured the Guinean government, which nevertheless informed the mining group that it wanted to increase its stake to 15% in HPX’s exploitation of the Mount Nimba iron ore deposit. Friedland, who had no objections, quickly travelled to Conakry. Still using his contacts, he made the trip with former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe. President Condé hosted a dinner at the Palais Sékhoutouréya on 7 August 2019. Afterwards, an agreement was signed between HPX and the Guinean government. Wanting to keep an eye on the dossier, Condé mentioned to Friedland the name of his former prime minister and ex-patron of Guinea Alumina Corporation (GAC), Mamady Youla, to run HPX’s Guinean subsidiary, Société des Mines de Fer de Guinée (SMFG).

Iron transport to Liberia

Under the new agreement, the Guinean president granted HPX the right to ship its ore through the Liberian port of Buchanan, the shortest route for exporting iron from Nimba. This measure, supported by former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and discussed with her Guinean counterpart, had previously been blocked by Conakry, which saw no financial advantage. This was despite the fact that an agreement was signed with Liberia in 1975 to export iron from Africa via its territory.

The year was 2020, all lights were green and the HPX team in Guinea quickly got down to business. Friedland, who wanted to see his iron ore leave Guinean soil, financed the study and research phases and the preparatory work on Mount Nimba to the tune of around $20m.

At the same time, in the agreement signed with Liberia, Friedland promised the government a certain amount of funding. “Alpha Condé worked hard to get Friedland to help Liberia. He told him that the country was in financial difficulty and had been criticised by the IMF. He had to give them financial support if he wanted to move his business along in Monrovia.” A few months after signing the agreement with Liberia, Friedland made an initial payment of $7m to the Central Bank of Liberia in December 2019.

$37m sent to Liberia…

In the course of 2022, Friedland – who was in the midst of negotiations with Monrovia to lift Arcelor Mittal’s monopoly on the railway leading to Buchanan – was discreetly contacted by the administration of President Georges Weah and by Guy de Selliers, chairman of the board of SMFG, HPX’s Guinean subsidiary.

Discussions began with the Minister of State for Presidential Affairs Nathaniel McGill and Finance minister Gesler E. Murray. In March 2022 HPX paid an additional $30m to help the Liberian government shore up its budget.

In return, Friedland requested that the payment be used to gain full access to the Liberian rail corridor operated by Arcelor Mittal to the Port of Buchanan. “I was not in favour of this payment because there was no binding, solid agreement ratified at the meeting to guarantee the interests of HPX,” a source close to the affair said. “Arcelor Mittal had also been approached by the Weah administration for financial support, but decided against it.”

In the end, the Liberian government failed to keep its word, and the financing turned out to be a losing proposition for Friedland, who still finds himself without access to the Liberian railway.