#general nice

In another blow to the licence holder for the (inactive) Isua project in Greenland, a court in Zhejiang province has ordered the seizure of shares in several General Nice (俊安集团) companies. This includes the entire share capital of Tianjin General Nice Coke and Chemicals Co., Ltd (天津俊安煤焦化工有限公司) , whose legal representative is the chairman of General Nice Group, Cai Suixin 蔡穗新.

This adds to the legal troubles that haunt various General Nice companies, as well as the family in charge of it (including chairman Cai, his sister Cai Suirong 蔡穗榕 and their father Cai Mingzhi 蔡明志). I have given a sample of these cases in earlier posts.

After failing to comply with Chinese court orders, companies part of General Nice (俊安) group, the owner of the Isua iron-ore project in Greenland, as well as two members of the family in control of it, have been added to the "List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement," as the name (失信被执行人名单) of a Supreme People's Court-issued list of judgement defaulters is often translated in PRC sources. The companies directly affected by the judgements behind the listing are not the direct owners of the Greenland project, so the only relevance for Greenland is what it can suggest about the Group's practices and financial health. However, a more direct Greenland connection comes from a separate source. According to a long-time Hong Kong publisher and financial analyst, the Hong Kong parent of the Greenland entity has been directly targeted by a lawsuit in that city.

Both individuals involved are related to the company's chairman, Cai Suixin 蔡穗新. They are his father, Cai Mingzhi 蔡明志, and his sister, Cai Suirong 蔡穗榕. Both have long had a number of positions in multiple Group companies. Cai senior is, or at least used to be, one of the main ultimate owners of the company, together with his son. Cai Mingzhi's political contacts in Guangzhou province reportedly opened many doors for General Nice, a (mostly) private player in a state-dominated sector. For more on the history of General Nice, see my General Nice backgrounder.

The List lists people and companies that have failed to comply with court judgements. Its purpose is to induce compliance by public shaming. For example, a sample of it was once displayed for two weeks on an enormous screen at Changsha railway station. It's searchable online. An evolving (and quite Orwellian) 'social credit' system is expected to impose a range of penalties on those on the wrong side of it, and that includes denizens of the List like the Cais. If they don't remove themselves from it on time, they could be prevented from buying plane tickets, to mention just one possible consequence. I've written about the List of Dishonest Persons before: one noted member of it is Huang Nubo 黄怒波, everyone's favourite poet-tycoon-mountaineer, known for his attempts to buy land in Iceland and Norway. Since I wrote that almost three years ago, old Huang Nubo List entries have been removed, suggesting he has perhaps paid up, but he has been honoured with a new one, over a new dispute that need not concern us here.

The judgements that landed the Cais on the list concern, among other companies, General Nice (Tianjin) Industry Co., Ltd (俊安（天津）实业有限公司). One of the creditors is an Agricultural Bank of China branch. The sums General Nice (and General Nice-linked) companies have failed to disburse as ordered by the courts total more than 70m yuan. Of course, it is possible that all those outstanding amounts have just been paid, but the online version of the List hasn't been updated yet.

In a separate development, Target, a Hong Kong publication by venerable Hong Kong financial analyst, journalist, editor, restaurant reviewer and poet Raymonde Sacklyn, reported in late April on a lawsuit brought against General Nice Development Ltd (俊安发展有限公司) and all three Cais by ICBC, over a mortgage and a guarantee. General Nice Development, another Group company, is the ultimate owner of the Jersey entity that owns the Greenland company that owns the Isua mine.

I've mentioned worrying developments about General Nice (while still omitting a few) in several posts, starting with that 'backgrounder' in 2015, months after the company entered the Greenland game. The Cais' group has kept afloat despite all these. In a surprising move, last year they attempted to purchase a derelict naval base in Greenland, only to be blocked by the Danish intervention, as leaked to Defence Watch and (months later) Reuters. In my previous long-ish read on China and Greenland, I speculated that the attempt to buy the base, despite hardly making any obvious business sense, catered to a Chinese state interest in it, perceived or explicit. The Isua mine purchase can also be read in that context: if questionable as a commercial investment, sitting on the licence can make General Nice useful in the eyes of state entities that would like to see the Greenland mine stay in Chinese hands.

This blog has featured poetry in the past, namely that of Huang Nubo, a celebrated poet under the pen name Luo Ying 骆英. I have quoted his verses about Château Lafite, about stockpiling condoms. I have mentioned how he flies first-class because that helps him write, and hope he'll make it out of the List of Dishonest Persons before the Social Credit System can prevent him from flying. With such precedent, I feel obliged to quote from Sacklyn'sserendipitously-titled poem The Loan:

After last week's news about a HK subsidiary of General Nice (俊安集团) going into liquidation and a general picture of problems with creditors, it has now emerged that their Greenland subsidiary, London Mining Greenland A/S, is undergoing a compulsory dissolution process (tvangsopløsning). According to Sermitsiaq, a request to have the company dissolved was filed at the Court of Greenland in August 2016. The distressed Greenland subsidiary owns the mining license for the Isua iron mine.

Sermitsiaq also talks of accounting problems related to the transfer of London Mining Greenland from its previous owner to General Nice in late '14. All accounting materials for that year appear to have disappeared: the location of "electronic data as well as physical documents" was unknown at the time of compiling the following annual report.

In other General Nice news: a North Sydney office building GN's HK-listed arm North Sydney bought for $50m in '13 to try and offset losses in their main business (mentioned in my General Nice backgrounder) is now part of an asset restructuring, and should end up being at least partially owned by Huarong, the asset manager that has also taken over management of the HK-listed subsidiary.

[UPDATE (Jan 3): Sermitsiaq reports today that two weeks ago the Court of Greenland allowed General Nice to retake the Greenland subsidiary, after four months under management by a liquidator. The reason for the dissolution order was that the company had failed to produce an annual report on time. Other than the report, a requirement to come out of dissolution was a capital injection, which apparently also happened. It remains unclear whether those missing documents related to the transfer to General Nice have materialised.

A company part of General Nice Group (俊安集团), the Chinese coal and iron trader that owns Isua iron mine in Greenland, has been ordered into liquidation by Hong Kong's High Court, after a petition by Australian creditors. The company, General Nice Resources (Hong Kong) Ltd (俊安资源(香港)有限公司), is not directly connected to the Greenland project, but there is an indirect link: Isua is owned (through a Jersey company) by another Hong Kong entity, General Nice Development (Hong Kong), which has a 40% stake in the company that has just fallen into liquidation. Thus, while the Greenland mine's ownership and management remains unaffected, a subsidiary of its owner has just been ordered to wind up.

The liquidation petition was launched by KordaMentha, an Australian insolvency firm appointed by General Nice as receiver of Pluton Resources, the owner of an iron mine on Cockatoo Island, WA. KordaMentha are said to be owed several million AUD for expenses incurred during their time at Pluton, where General Nice have a controlling stake. Pluton has seen a good amount of drama in the last couple of years, with disputes between General Nice, a Chinese partner, a Chinese client and Australian contractors, including multiple, at one time simultaneous, receiverships, a police intervention, and litigation in Hong Kong and Australia, up to the Supreme Court. To the extent what I've read about Pluton can be summarised in any meaningful way, General Nice claim they've been pumping funds into Pluton to keep it alive despite low iron prices, while everybody else claims General Nice owe them money.

Last year, another creditor, Baosteel subsidiary Ningbo Steel (宁波钢铁), had asked for General Nice Resources HK to be wound up. General Nice acknowledged the debt, but sued back, arguing Ningbo Steel were trying to hurt their reputation. Ningbo eventually dropped the liquidation petition and apparently got paid, but GN's case against Ningbo went on for some time. In a nutshell, GN say Ningbo's petition was defamatory and frivolous as they were going to pay anyway, while Ningbo say the petition was justified since they got paid thanks to it.

But there's more. General Nice Group, including the Greenland licence-holder, is ultimately largely owned by its chairman, Cai Suixin 蔡穗新, and his family. (I wrote an overview of the Group some time ago.) Another recent Hong Kong court order targeted Cai directly. In late October, a High Court judge forbade Cai from removing assets from Hong Kong (or to keep at least US$20m within HK). The order was requested by a Mainland bank.

And still more. Besides that Mainland-related injunction against Cai, two more banks are trying to claim debts, according to Oriental Daily News. A month ago, Société Générale filed bankruptcy petitions against Cai Suixin and his sister Cai Suirong 蔡穗榕, who's also involved in various companies in the Group. And in yet another case, last week HSBC petitioned the High Court attempting to recover mortgaged property in the Le Cachet (嘉逸轩) development in Happy Valley (跑马地) from Cai Suirong.

General Nice's Arctic foray is not easy to interpret. The takeover of the Isua mine, which has no development perspectives in the medium term, and the (thwarted) attempt to buy a derelict naval base in Greenland (something I'll be writing about soon), don't seem to make much sense as commercial investments for a company that could use some profits. Perhaps the value of these Arctic moves is favour with state entities (including SOEs) related to them, rather than directly generated profits.

[Update, Dec 30th: General Nice Group chairman Cai Suixin 蔡穗新 and high executive Lau Yu 柳宇 are resigning from their posts at the Group's Hong Kong-listed company, "for personal reasons and hoping to devote more time to other business." Their replacements come from Huarong 华融 Asset Management, a large state-owned company specialised in distressed assets, that is said to be in the process of restructuring some other General Nice assets.

The Hong Kong-listed company is not related to the Isua mine in Greenland. The company gone into liquidation discussed in this post is a shareholder in it. I explained the (rather colourful) history of the listed arm here.

The transitional government of Burkina Faso has authorised Frank Timiș' Pan African Burkina to resume manganese exports from their Tambao mine. Their export license had been suspended in March over the company's alleged failure to invest in road and railway infrastructure (Jeune Afrique).

The reason this appears in an ostensibly Northern-looking blog is that the Tambao mine used to belong to a subsidiary of General Nice Group (俊安集团), the current owner of the (dormant) Isua iron mine in Greenland. General Nice conducted exploration activities at Tambao through 2012, and, at least according to their interpretation of the license agreement, had exclusive rights to take the mine to the production stage. The government of Blaise Campaoré (who had been president since 1987) begged to differ, and instead resold the mine to Timiș, a Romanian-Australian miner.

It probably speaks in General Nice's favour that Campaoré had done more or less the same thing before: rights to explore the mine had first been sold to UAE-based Wadi Al Rawda before the Campaoré administration decided to sell them again to General Nice. The Emiratis sued at an arbitration tribunal, a dispute settled in 2013. General Nice also sued when they were in turn deprived of their permit. Quite unusually in the context of Chinese companies in Africa, a rather strong-worded campaign was launched on Facebook and local media defending General Nice's position and accusing Campaoré and his entourage of corruption, as described in my background article on General Nice.

Compaoré was ousted in 2014 and fled to Côte d'Ivoire. The transitional government announced it would revise mining contracts signed by the previous administration, such as the award of the Tambao permit to Timiș' company. With their nemesis Compaoré in exile (and just issued an arrest warrant) and Timiș prevented from exporting, things were starting to look better for General Nice. Talks to reach a settlement (GN are claiming $50m in compensation) started again, and as of last July the country's Council of Ministers was voicing its will to "continue negotiations" with GN "in order to reach a definitive settlement of the dispute".

A quick update on General Nice (俊安集团), the license holder for the Isua iron mine in Greenland.

Some two weeks ago, the group's Hong Kong-listed company, Loudong General Nice Resources (樓東俊安), entered a conditional agreement to issue some $50m in convertible bonds to state-owned investment manager China Huarong 华融. That money would help pay for an investment in a Mainland logistics business Loudong GN have been talking about for some time.

Loudong General Nice have had a tough couple of years as their historical core business of Shanxi coal generated considerable losses, but they've been trying to diversify away from it and have already managed to get some new Mainland shareholders on board, as I've reported recently. Their shares are trading at almost three times what they were worth not two months ago.

General Nice's HK-listed company is not directly involved in Isua.

The latest issue of Mining Global carries a piece on General Nice's plans for the Isua iron mine in Greenland, the rights to which they acquired last December from Ebola-stricken London Mining. In what seem to be the first media comments about their plans for the project, they talk about ongoing work on an "optimisation plan" for the project and a "thorough review [of] its economic value" amid discussions with potential contractors and investors. They are even "reviewing the potential of other projects" in Greenland and elsewhere in the region.

Some of these comments come from none less than Jenny Yang (Yang Jianzhen 杨建珍), whose involvement with the Isua project goes back several years, to her role in promoting it to Chinese investors as London Mining's represenative in China. Ms Yang is now quoted as vice president of General Nice Development (俊安发展有限公司), the HK-based company that owns the project through a Jersey company. General Nice Development is mostly owned by Group chairman Cai Suixin 蔡穗新 and his father. As I've mentioned before, Ms Yang was involved in contacts between General Nice and London Mining related to cooperation related to the latter's Marampa iron mine in Sierra Leone.

An excursus into iron mining in Sierra Leone might be in order here. After London Mining fell into administration, the Marampa mine ended up being acquired by Romanian-Australian mining entrepreneur Frank Timiș. Marampa isn't doing particularly well and work at the mine has been suspended amid a dispute with former staff over retirement payments. The Tonkolili iron mine, Sierra Leone's largest, has meanwhile passed from Timiș's African Minerals (in administration) into Chinese hands after Shandong Steel (山东钢铁), who already held a minority stake at the project, acquired the remainder of it by taking control of African Minerals. And in Burkina Faso, the Tambao manganese mine, owned by Timiș's Pan African Minerals, was ordered to halt production while the government reviews the legality of the license, awarded to Pan African after being taken from a General Nice company. (General Nice didn't take lightly to it and are claiming compensation from the Burkinabe government; I've also written on that dispute.) The Tambao mine was also the scene of the kidnapping of a Romanian employee last month, now allegedly held in Mali by a jihadist group.

General Nice's stated enthusiasm about developing the Greenland mine goes against a climate of skepticism among Chinese industry sources about the economic sense of investing in a large, expensive project with prices this low. Then again, the sheer fact of owning the Isua mine and talking about it might help the company garner support for other investments in the region that might offer better medium-term profitability.