“It was not unexpected that this would take time for the market to understand,” Gold Fields Chief Executive Officer Chris Griffith said Friday in a TV interview with BNN Bloomberg. “There was quite a large shareholder base saying we don’t understand this.”
Van Eck Associates Corp., the biggest Yamana investor and the third-largest shareholder in Gold Fields, is critical of the transaction, the Globe and Mail reported Thursday. Portfolio manager Joe Foster called the deal “poorly structured” and said the market doesn’t understand the strategy behind the deal, the newspaper reported. Messages left with Foster weren’t immediately returned.
Another Gold Fields investor, Redwheel, called for the transaction to be scrapped in June.
Griffith says he “remains confident in our deal” and hopes to get the majority of investors on board by the time shareholders vote on the transaction. The Johannesburg-based miner will…
