The big headline out of South Africa today is:
Uranium One tanks as Froneman jumps ship
Share price loses 12.8% on resignation
This is news that broke Friday and is being trumpeted on the South African newspapers here today, on Monday morning.
To quickly connect the dots here, a few weeks ago Borat-gate broke in the New York times. Basically, Clinton buddy Frank Giustra created a shell of a company that purported to be a mining company without any mining technology or equipment. What Frank had was a buddy, Bill Clinton, who travelled with him to a uranium rich place, i.e. Kazakhstan, to meet with high government officials.
Upon securing some very lucrative mining rights deals from the Kazakh government, Frank sold his faux-uranium-mining company, UrAsia, to a real mining company called Uranium One for $3.1 billion.
Uranium One is a big player here in South Africa, thus the news is big here.
I'm sort of surprised that the NY Times or WSJ hasn't picked this story up yet. Of course, it's 95% a financial story until more investigation is done around the Clinton involvement.
The #'s are certainly eye-opening. 10's of millions for the Clinton Library, and billions for his buddy Frank Giustra. And the resulting Uranium One shareholders seem to be holding the bag, at present.
Here's an article in Moneyweb concerning Froneman's resignation.