The Promoter

摘要

These are mighty days for Robert Friedland. the 53-year-old natural resources billionaire has been racking up miles on his corporate jet, charming investors at conferences from Hong Kong to New Orleans, cajoling Japanese and Korean bankers, working with the repressive governments of China and Burma. It helps that commodity prices, as recorded by the Reuters-Commodity Research Bureau index, are up 30% in the last two years. But the real attraction is Friedland himself and his tales of copper and gold deposits buried under the Gobi Desert. This Mongolian mother lode is in a remote place called Turquoise Hill, or Oyu Tolgoi, as the locals refer to it. Friedland calls it "the treasure chest," and claims it contains perhaps as much copper as Falconbridge's rich Collahuasi mine in Chile. Turquoise Hill is right on the doorstep of China, which last year sucked up 2.5 million tons of copper, making it the world's largest consumer. Indigent Mongolia, Friedland says, has pledged to do everything necessary to help develop the site. "I'm not in the business of giving investment advice," Friedland recently told Bloomberg News. "On the other hand, this is one of the major copper and gold discoveries in the world." His evidence: core samples taken over the last two years, but no comprehensive engineering studies yet.