Bob Buchan

Mr Buchan is a mining entrepreneur and fund manage who, some would say, could only emerge in Canada - the country which spawned Robert "Toxic Bob" Friedland, founder of Ivanhoe Mines and probably the most notorious private mining investor of all.

Buchan started his career as a mining analyst, then put this experience to use in helping form CMP Funds Management which, between 1984 and 1990, raised more than US$1 billion for Canada's extractive enterprises. In 1987, he also helped create DCC Equities and Dundee Capital (see Dundee Securities) [MJ 20 May 2011].

Six years later, in 1993, Buchan "decided to run a gold company myself" and set up Kinross Gold.

More recently, he has been the executive chairman of Elgin Mining Inc (formerly Phoenic Mining Inc). formerly a coal company and now active in gold mining in the Indigenous northern Canadian territory of Nunavut [MJ ibid].

He is also the executive chairman of Allied Nevada Gold (listed in Toronto) whose main project is a highly lucrative gold mine in Nevada which, claims Buchan, could become one of America's biggest gold mines and the world's third largest silver producer [MJ ibid].

Buchan's sights are also fixed on transforming Tochstone Gold Ltd, the exploration company bankrolled by by his family's funds, into a public company by listing it soon on the London Stock Exchange's AIM.

Touchstone is likely to become the most controversial of his ventures: it already owns four exploration licences in Segovia, on Colombia's gold belt, covering an area of 39 square kilometres.

Nor is Colombia a field in which Mr Buchan hasn't already played. Under his tutelage, Kinross became the largest single shareholder in a Canadian-based company called Greystar Resources.

This outfit's attempts to gain an environmental permit for its Angostura gold mine have so far been knocked back by the Colombian authorities.

There have been vociferous protests at the the dangers this open-pit mine would pose to the vital paramos eco-system, and to the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities residing there [1].

• Greystar Resources itself planned to list on the LSE's AIM market in June 2011, but cancelled the move during March 2011 [Mining Weekly, 3 May 2011].

In early 2012, TSX-listed Richmont Mines Inc. (with producing gold mines in Canada)announced that it had appointed Bob Buchan to its board of directors, after Buchan and two members of his family made a CDN$10 million private placement with the company [MarketWire 1 February 2012].