WHY?

AUSTRALIA
Fortescue executive rout continues as Debelle quits green unit

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
Reuters | August 31, 2023 |

(Image courtesy of Fortescue Metals Group.)

Guy Debelle, the former Reserve Bank of Australia deputy governor, resigned from the board of Fortescue Metals Group’s green energy unit on Friday, media reports said, continuing the run of abrupt departures by executives at the world’s fourth largest miner.


Debelle has stepped down as a non-executive director from the board of Fortescue Future Industries (FFI), the green energy arm of Fortescue Metals Group, the Australian Financial Review reported.

In an exchange filing, critical minerals firm Tivan said Debelle will be joining its board as a non-executive director, but did not mention if he would leave FFI’s board.

Fortescue did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

This is the third senior executive departure from Fortescue just this week. Shares of the miner were trading 3.7% lower in early trade at A$20.64 as at 0012 GMT.

Debelle’s exit comes days after Fortescue’s metals division’s CEO Fiona Hick announced her departure after just six months in the role, and on Thursday the division’s finance chief Christine Morris stepped down after taking on the job three months ago.

Overseen by founder Andrew Forrest as executive chairman, Fortescue has struggled to keep senior management as it sets out to transform itself into a green energy superpower with a global footprint.

The iron ore giant logged a pretax impairment of $1 billion to its flagship Iron Bridge growth project in Western Australia and reported its lowest annual profit since 2020.

“Shareholders are going to be concerned about what and why all these people are leaving, and we’re not really getting the answers,” said Damian Rooney, director of equity sales at Argonaut said.

“It’s all good to wave your arms around and talk about going green, but at the end of the day, you still need to look after your shareholders who are investing money for growth, dividends and alike,” Rooney said.

Executive chairman Andrew Forrest, who spoke to local media earlier this week, said CEO Hick stepped aside following differences of opinion over the firm’s green transition.

“What we have now is a literally galloping herd of people who want to see this company go green,” he said, according to The Australian.

“So if you want to step outside that, you’re given a choice. You’re not fired, there’s no disagreement, you’re just given a choice: step back in, or you call it,” Forrest was quoted as saying.

Hick had joined Fortescue in February, after a year-long search for a replacement for former chief executive Elizabeth Gaines.

Ian Wells, Fortescue’s former chief financial officer, left in January, and acting chief financial officer of the energy division, Felicity Gooding, stepped down last month.

“We view the uncertainty created by multiple changes at the executive levels over the past several years as credit negative,” Sean Williams, analyst at Moody’s Investors Service said in a note earlier in the week.

(By Praveen Menon; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Michael Perry)

Eramet to resume manganese mining in Gabon IMMEDIATELY after coup

CAPITALI$M DOESN'T CARE
Bloomberg News | August 30, 2023 | 

Manganese oxide rock. (Reference image by James St. John, Flickr).

Eramet SA will restart production at its manganese mining operations in Gabon on Thursday, ending a temporary halt in the wake of the military coup in the country.


The Paris-based miner said late Wednesday it has decided to resume mining operations in after monitoring events in the country, after announcing earlier in the day that it would halt activity as a precautionary measure. Shares of Eramet, which has been expanding its key Moanda mine, slumped as much as 22% in Paris.

While Gabon is better known as an oil producer, Eramet has been investing heavily in expanding manganese output in recent years. That’s helped the former French colony become the world’s number-two supplier of the metal, which is a key ingredient in steelmaking and is finding growing usage in electric-vehicle batteries.

Manganese is one of the world’s most abundant mined elements, but production is concentrated in a handful of countries including South Africa, Gabon, Australia and China. Eramet said last month that the global market was in a slight surplus in the first half of the year, but there are growing concerns about supply risks surrounding high-purity forms of the metal that are needed by battery-makers.

Earlier this year, the European Commission proposed designating battery-grade manganese as a strategic raw material, alongside other metals like copper and nickel that play a key role in the energy transition.

Gabon’s manganese assets are a major source of revenue and employment for the state. Eramet paid more than €132 million ($144 million) in taxes and dividends in 2022 and spent more than €407 million on local purchases and subcontracting. The company directly employed 8,767 people, it said in a report in June.

Eramet said it will continue to monitor the situation in Gabon closely. It also said it will immediately restart rail transport activity, while passenger train movements will remain suspended.

(By Mark Burton and Francois de Beaupuy)

CRYPTO CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

'As bad as I feared': Actor Ben McKenzie warns of crypto investments

Ben Cousins, BNN Bloomberg

Aug 30, 2023

Actor Ben McKenzie, best known for his roles in “The O.C.” and “Gotham,” is warning about the risks in crypto investments after spending two years investigating the industry. 

McKenzie, who has a degree in economics and recently co-authored the book “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud,” said he began investigating the industry when his acting roles dried up during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“I started paying attention to the financial markets really for the first time in my life,” he told BNN Bloomberg in a television interview Wednesday. “I saw all these things that seemed inexplicable initially – meme stocks, crypto, NFTs – and decided to do some research.” 

McKenzie said his initial suspicions about the industry were confirmed. 

“It’s actually at least as bad as I feared, if not worse,” he said. “It’s been a pretty wild ride, but I have to say a lot of the things I’ve been warning about for the last two years have proven true.” 

McKenzie doesn’t refer to cryptocurrencies as “currency” because he argued that most users are investing rather than using it to buy goods. 

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been cracking down on the crypto industry in 2023 – an enforcement trend that is long overdue, according to McKenzie.

“What we’re seeing now is the rubber hitting the road,” McKenzie said. “All of these effectively unregistered, unregulated securities are finally coming under scrutiny legally and I don’t think they’re going to stand up.” 

On Wednesday, the SEC was dealt a blow in its fight to regulate the crypto industry, as a U.S. appeals court overturned its block of Grayscale Investments LLC’s first exchange-traded fund tied to Bitcoin. 

INTERVIEW WITH SBF 

For his book, McKenzie interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried, the beleaguered founder and CEO of FTX. Bankman-Fried faces 13 federal charges in the U.S., including fraud, conspiracy, campaign finance law violations and money laundering related to his alleged work with the company.

McKenzie interviewed the crypto founder in the summer of last year before Bankman-Fried’s arrest – and he said the warning signs were already showing. 

“When I sat down with him, I had a lot of questions,” he said. “There were red flags in abundance.”

With files from Bloomberg News

Morning Markets 

Actor Ben McKenzie on why crypto is the largest Ponzi scheme in history

Ben McKenzie, actor, writer, director, and co-author of New York Times best selling book 'Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and The Golden Age of Fraud, joins BNN Bloomberg to talk about his latest book and why he believes crypto is a scam.  08:21

These are the EASTERN Canadian cities getting pro women’s hockey teams

Ben Cousins, BNN Bloomberg

 Aug 29, 2023

Team Bauer Jill Saulnier, right, shoots wide of Team Sonnet goalie Shea Tiley during third period PWHPA Dream Tour hockey action in Calgary, Alta., Monday, May 24, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh

The Professional Women’s Hockey League has announced it will begin its inaugural season in January 2024 with six teams based in Canadian and U.S. cities.

The league will feature six teams – Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Boston, New York City and Minnesota – to play 24 regular season games each.

League activities begin with free agency on Sept.1, followed by a draft on Sept. 18.

“Today, we look ahead to a phenomenal future for the PWHL,” Jayna Hefford, PWHL senior vice president of hockey operations, said in a news release. “We have never seen more excitement and demand for women’s sports, and through the launch of this league, the top women’s players in the world will have the opportunity to reach even greater heights.”

The league said it is in the final stages of securing general managers for the six clubs, who will then be in charge of forming their teams in advance of the season.

Mark and Kimbra Walter are financially supporting the new league. Mark is the part owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and CEO of Guggenheim Partners and the two run their philanthropic arm, The Walter Family Causes.

For years, women’s hockey had been divided into two entities, the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) and the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA).

That changed earlier this year, when the Mark Walter Group and Billie Jean King Enterprises – already financiers of the PWHPA – bought the PHF and essentially paved the way for the unified league.

 

Rising housing costs push more Canadians to co-purchase properties: Survey

Iva Poshnjari, BNN Bloomberg

A growing number of Canadians are choosing to co-own properties as one way to sustain the sky-high cost of housing, a survey by Royal LePage has found.

The data showed 76 per cent of Canadian co-owners, defined by Royal LePage as people or couples who own a property with at least one other person, reported that affordability was a major motivator behind their decision to co-purchase a property.

“The inability to afford a home on their own, and wanting more space and a more desirable location, were among the other reasons co-owners decided to purchase a home with another party,” the report released on Thursday stated.
 
CO-OWNING ON THE RISE
 
Of the real estate professionals that were polled for the survey, 23 per cent said they have seen an increase in the number of homebuyers purchasing with a person other than a spouse or significant other compared to pre-pandemic times.
 
Thirty-two per cent of homebuyers who co-own due to affordability issues purchased properties after the Bank of Canada began hiking rates in March 2022.
 
WHO IS BUYING PROPERTIES TOGETHER?
 
More than half of co-owners, at 56 per cent, own a home with their parents or parents-in-law, while 18 per cent co-own with their adult children, the findings showed.
 
At the national level, six per cent of buyers co-own a home with someone other than their spouse, and 89 per cent of this group said they co-own with a family member. Another seven per cent said they own a property with friends, and eight per cent co-own a property with someone who is not a relative or a friend, the data revealed.
 
Canadian co-owners prefer to purchase a single-family detached home, with 62 per cent saying this was their co-owned property of choice, according to the data.
 
Data from the 2021 census show that multigenerational households are now the fastest growing household type in Canada. 

Forty-four per cent of co-owners said that all fellow co-owners live in the home together, while 28 per cent say that they co-own a home with another person but they do not cohabitate.
 
“Some Canadians are using co-ownership as a way of boosting their borrowing capacity or lowering their monthly mortgage costs, helping them achieve their goal of home ownership,” Karen Yolevski, chief operating officer of Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd, said in the news release.
 
“The decision to live together, including co-owning a home, is a decision increasingly made for financial reasons.”
 
Survey methodology: The survey by Royal LePage was conducted by Leger. The findings are a result of an online survey of 501 Canadians 18+, who co-own their home with someone other than their spouse, was completed between August 10, 2023, and August 21, 2023, using Leger’s online panel.

Now Showing

One of the largest housing bubbles of all time? 6:20

 

Canadian pot stocks jump on reports that U.S. may ease cannabis restrictions

BNN Bloomberg 

Embattled Canadian cannabis stocks jumped Thursday on the hope that the U.S. may ease restrictions on the substance. 

The Associated Press reported that the U.S. health department has recommended marijuana be moved from a schedule one to a schedule three controlled substance. 

U.S. Senate leaders hailed the recommendation Wednesday as a first step toward easing federal restrictions on cannabis. 

Shares in Canopy Growth Corp. rose more than 28 per cent Thursday, after climbing nine per cent Wednesday. 

Tilray Brands, Inc. shares rose almost 11 per cent, after its stock rose more than 10 per cent Wednesday.  

Shares of Aurora Cannabis Inc. rose almost five per cent.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 31, 2023.

Expert not optimistic about agreement between Meta, Canada on news payments

Daniel Johnson, BNN Bloomberg

Aug 24, 2023

As Meta Platforms Inc. has started blocking news in Canada, one expert said an agreement between the federal government and the social media giant seems unlikely – but an agreement with Google is possible.

Tech companies and the federal government remain in a standoff regarding the Online News Act, a law set to come into force later this year that will force tech companies to pay news publishers for content shared on their platforms.

Meta announced this month that it had begun removing Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram in response to the law, and on Monday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly criticized Meta for blocking news on its platforms amid wildfires and evacuations in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.

Michael Geist, Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said he “doesn’t see much hope of an agreement” between Meta and the federal government.

“I don’t see an agreement with Meta short of withdrawing the law, and I don’t see that happening,” Geist told BNNBloomberg.ca in an email on Sunday.

He added that the social media platform seemingly wants “out of news” and is unlikely to agree to legislation that dictates payment based on the use of links.

The situation appears slightly different with Google, which has also expressed frustration with the law and tested blocking news for some Canadian users earlier this year.

“Reports suggest some discussion around the regulations that might provide Google with cost certainty on the payments. That represents a major departure for the government but might be enough to find a middle ground,” Geist said.

Any agreement between Google and the federal government is unlikely to compel Meta to follow suit, according to Geist, because the two companies value news differently.

“For Google, there is value in its inclusion in its search index. No such value for Meta,” he said.

Geist said that a workable solution could come in the form of pivoting from a link-based payment system to either a taxation or fund model.

“I think taxation is the best approach but a fund model (similar to film and TV) could be used to support journalism while eliminating many of the problems,” he said.

STATE OF NEGOTIATIONS 

In a release in June, Meta stated that content including news links posted by Canadian publishers and broadcasters would no longer be accessible to individuals in the country. 

As of last week, the Office of the Minister of Canadian Heritage wouldn’t confirm if any future meetings were scheduled with Meta. 

“Facebook knows they have no obligations under the Act right now. They have not participated in the regulatory process,” Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge said in a written statement to BNNBloomberg.ca.

St-Onge said while Google and Meta earn the majority of digital ad revenue in Canada, hundreds of news outlets have closed. She added that a free and independent press is integral to the nation's democracy and that Canadians expect tech companies to follow the nation's laws. 

St-Onge added that a free and independent press is integral to the nation's democracy and that Canadians expect tech companies to follow the nation's laws. 

“(Meta) would rather block their users from accessing good quality and local news instead of paying their fair share to news organizations.” 

Google confirmed in a statement to BNNBloomberg.ca last week that talks with the government were ongoing, but noted concerns that the regulatory process will not be sufficient to resolve current “structural issues” with the Online News Act. 

THE PATH FORWARD

Ricard Gil, a professor of business economics at the Queen’s University Smith School of Business, told with BNNBloomberg.ca that all sides must enter negotiations in order to find a solution.

He said discussions between tech companies and the government should focus on the importance of the Canadian news ecosystem as well as the use of content from Canadian publishers. 

“I'm pretty sure that Google and Meta value (Canadian news) and so that's where you actually see joint pockets of value,” Gil said in an interview last week. “If the Canadian government and the big tech companies can negotiate around these pockets of value, maybe we'll get to a point where there’s an agreement.”

Gil noted that tech companies have shown a willingness to remove news content based on regional legislation or “completely shut down their services” in certain areas. 

Canada’s Online News Act differs from legislation in Europe that attempted to compel tech companies to compensate news organizations for using content, Gil noted.  

He said that under those previous laws, “newspapers could actually opt out” if they decided the benefits provided by tech platforms outweighed the costs, but that isn’t the case with Canada’s law.

“(Canada’s Online News Act) is more aggressive in that sense that the right to opt-out has basically (been) taken away from the news outlets,” he said. 

BCE is the parent company of BNN Bloomberg through its Bell Media division.

Now Showing

Meta will likely bargain and reinstate news on its platforms in Canada: Analyst  3:35

Rogers wins costs as court blasts 'unreasonable' antitrust czar

Derek Decloet, Bloomberg News

A court ordered Canada’s competition body to pay millions to Rogers Communications Inc., saying the country’s antitrust czar engaged in “unreasonable behavior” in its legal challenge of the company’s takeover of a rival. 

Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell “adopted an unnecessarily contentious approach” in trying to block Rogers’ deal with Shaw Communications Inc., dragging out the legal case, the federal competition tribunal said in a ruling dated Aug. 28. 

The tribunal, which is Canada’s merger court, ordered the commissioner to pay about $13 million (US$9.6 million) to Rogers and Shaw in legal fees and costs.

Boswell pressed ahead with his battle even after the companies agreed to sell most of Shaw’s wireless business to Quebecor Inc. to address concerns that Rogers would have too much market share. He argued the court should still block the $20 billion takeover on the grounds it was anticompetitive, but he lost, and Rogers finally acquired Shaw in April, two years after the deal was announced.

Paul Crampton, the Federal Court of Canada chief justice who presided over the antitrust hearings last year, wrote that the commissioner’s position “was intransigent and should now have consequences.” A spokesperson for Boswell didn’t immediately return an email requesting comment. 

“Although the amounts to be awarded to the Respondents represent only a small fraction of the legal fees actually incurred, it appears that they far exceed any amount that has previously been awarded by the Tribunal for legal fees,” Crampton said in the ruling. 

Now Showing

Minister Champagne on Rogers, fourth wireless competitor 5:09

 

Less than one in five federally funded charging stations are operational

The Canadian Press

A ClipperCreek Inc. charging plug is seen connected to a General Motors Co. (GM) Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle (EV) at a charging station in Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Tuesday, July 11, 2017. City Council committee signed off financing for a program to provide more than $1.1 million in funding to add dozens of EV charging stations around the city in addition to the 560 already in place at city facilities and street locations. , Bloomberg

More than 43,000 electric vehicle chargers have been funded over the last seven years under the federal government's two main EV infrastructure programs.

But data supplied by the Department of Natural Resources shows fewer than one in five are actually operational.

The data comes as Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson is in Quebec City today making another funding announcement on EV chargers.

He says the current electric car charging program will spend $25 million to add another 1,500 chargers in Quebec.

Together, the government's two funding programs have invested $768 million between 2016 and 2027 to buy and install nearly 90,000 chargers.

About one-third of the 23,000 charging stations in Canada that are operational now came out of those programs, but almost 35,000 chargers that received funding aren't yet installed or working.

An analysis for the federal government by the research firm Dunsky Energy and Climate says Canada likely will need 52,000 chargers in place by the end of 2025 and about 200,000 by 2030 to meet national sales targets for getting more EVs on the road.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 30, 2023.

Four companies inch closer to realizing wind, hydrogen plans in Newfoundland

The Canadian Press

Four companies are one step closer to building wind-powered hydrogen and ammonia plants on the blustery island of Newfoundland as the province vies to become a key player in the nascent global hydrogen energy market.

Energy Minister Andrew Parsons announced Wednesday that the province had chosen four proposals from an initial pool of 24, and asked the companies to formally apply for the Crown land needed to realize the projects. Taken together, the projects would occupy roughly 5.1 million square kilometres of Crown land.

"I am pretty confident that this is going to blossom into something that is of huge importance to this province," Parsons told reporters. Unlike the province's offshore oil industry, he said, "We're not subsidizing this industry, we're not providing these companies with money to prop them up. They're coming with private financing in the millions and into the billions."

Newfoundland and Labrador is known for winds strong enough to topple transport trucks, but a government-imposed moratorium on wind-energy projects had been in place for more than a decade. Parsons announced an end to the moratorium last April.

Months later, the government opened a call for bids for Crown land directed at companies looking to develop wind projects. Twenty-four projects submitted by 19 companies went through a two-stage evaluation process. Nine made it past the first stage and, as of Wednesday, four cleared the second stage.

The successful bidders include the Newfoundland and Labrador arm of EverWind Fuels, based in Nova Scotia, and World Energy GH2, a company whose directors include seafood billionaire John Risley and Brendan Paddick, a close friend of Premier Andrew Furey.

Parsons told reporters that those close ties did not translate into preferential treatment.

"If anything, I think that sort of spurred us to ensure that when this is all said and done, we have a process that stands up to any form of scrutiny," Parsons said.

He noted that the team assigned to analyze the proposals included an independent fairness adviser, as well as a third-party financial analyst and representatives from the Department of Indigenous Affairs and Reconciliation.

The Crown land selected by the four successful companies will be held in reserve, and the businesses will have 18 months to begin the application process to develop the land, a government official said in a media briefing before Parsons spoke. That process will include environmental impact assessments. World Energy GH2 has already submitted its environmental assessment reports.

The companies will pay the government 3.5 per cent of the reserved land's market value, beginning Wednesday. That works out to a total of about $22 million a year, the official said.

Overall, the government expects the four chosen projects to contribute about $11.7 billion to provincial coffers over their lifespans of about 40 years.

Commodities Issues facing renewable energy industry will be blips than blunders: 

ClearView Energy Partners VP

Timothy Fox, vice president of ClearView Energy Partners, joins BNN Bloomberg to discuss how offshore windfarms are facing regulatory and inflationary challenges. He says the end of the era of cheap money has caused the drop in renewable energy prices and investment in the industry.