News

April 01, 2008

Cluff Moves Into Production, But There’s Still Real Development Upside In Sierra Leone

By Alastair Ford

Algy Cluff would make a passable member of the Runnagates Club, John Buchan’s illustrious – if fictional - dining society, at which luminaries such as Richard Hanny, Sandy Arbuthnot, and Sir Edward Leithen swap tales of mischief, adventure and derring-do. Algy may not have saved the British Empire from Teutonic skullduggery like Hannay did in the Thirty-Nine Steps, shored up the crumbling Russian front like Arbuthnot did in Greenmantle, or quite scaled the heights of Sir Edward Leithen, who at one point was attorney general. But saving the British Empire is out of fashion these days anyway, and were these three, along with their former fellow diners of near equal pedigree to reconvene, Algy, with his tales of Tiny Rowland, Conrad Black, Robert Mugabe and Harry Winston would have more than held his own. Hannay, after all, was a mining engineer who’d “made his pile” in Africa before the secret agent Scudder intervened in his life and turned it upside down with assassination plots and escapades on Scottish moorland.

Algy has made a “pile” or two of his own, and not just in Africa. But before we take this analogy too far, it’s only fair to point out that, as he sits comfortably down to lunch at the RAC Club - which with a royal charter dating back to 1907 might well have been the setting for Buchan’s Runnagates - Algy’s attention is firmly on the future. Rowland, Black and Mugabe are just by way of small talk, although not totally irrelevant, as we shall see. The real business in hand is Cluff Gold and the...