If only looking at the world’s diversified miners was simply about the quality of the materials they pull out of the ground. Instead, these commodity-producing giants seem to be dogged by run-ins with governments, questions about their track record on safety and wrangles about boardroom governance and their listing structure.
BHP Billiton, or BHP as it now is, has all of this and more: tax disputes, runaway trains, mining problems that have ruined ambitious productivity targets and, for the past three years, an activist investor in the form of Elliott Advisors pressing it to offload assets and simplify its structure. Where to start?
The group was formed from the merger in 2001 between BHP and Billiton and only dropped the latter from its name