Ex-Sirius mining chief ousted by Anglo American

ANGLO American has ousted the boss of its North Yorkshire potash mine and admitted it will take another year to set a budget for the sprawling project.

Anglo rescued the woodsmith mine, which was formerly owned by sirius Minerals, from the brink of collapse last year.

The firm’s near disintegration and cut-price sale at £405m lost thousands of retail shareholders huge sums of money.

sirius was led for more than a decade by Chris Fraser (pictured right), who stayed as head of the project following the takeover.

But yesterday Anglo said he had been moved to a role doing ‘special projects’ and that he would be replaced by trusted company man Tom McCulley, who has spent years overseeing the development of a huge copper mine in Peru.

The company also warned it will take up to another year to put together a detailed engineering plan, budget and timeline for the multi-billion-pound woodsmith mine. it was originally planning to set these by summer 2021, before pushing them back to this winter. Anglo said a technical review had shown a ‘number of elements of the project design’ would benefit from being changed.

The hugely ambitious project is nestled in the North York Moors National Park and is within sight of the coastal town of whitby. To obtain planning permission sirius agreed to build a 23-mile tunnel to take the mined polyhalite fertiliser to a processing facility on Teesside.

But costs spiralled and in september 2020 it failed to raise £400m in junk bonds from increasingly wary investors.

Anglo will pump another £580m into developing the Yorkshire site next year – taking the total amount it has invested since the takeover to £1.1bn.