Resource World Magazine

O C T O B E R / N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 www.resourceworld.com 7 RESOURCE WORLD: How did you get started in the mining business? CLIVE JOHNSON: I started out in the late 1970s with a summer job to pay my way to university. I got a job with a small independent contractor called Bema Industries which did claim staking, line cutting and camp construction for mining companies. I sensed a good opportunity at Bema, so I ended my studies in political science and English and became a partner in Bema. Bema grew quickly into a well- regarded consulting contractor mainly in BC and the Yukon where I was running the Yukon operations in my early twenties. We were successful but decided rather than be at the whim of other companies' explora- tion budgets, why don't we do something ourselves. In the early 1980s, we decided to go public and look for gold projects. We created three successful public explora- tion companies that we merged to become Bema Gold in 1988, when I became CEO. RW: Was your goal to get into administration? CJ: My goal was to be in gold explora- tion and be a part of building something. The attraction was being a part of a dynamic group. I came to realize that I was entrepreneurial and had pretty good busi- ness sense so my responsibilities became raising money, negotiating business deals and the other things that go along with it – plus we had a strong exploration team, and later added development and operat- ing expertise. RW: I've been told that you con- sider yourself a contrarian. How did this approach work for you? CJ: There's a couple of different ways. If you look at the history of being an explora- tion contracting company to being a public exploration company, that's perhaps not that unusual, but if you look at taking an exploration company and turning it into a successful builder and operator of mines – that's unusual and contrarian in a way. In our industry, for the most part, there are two groups of people. There are the rare exploration groups that find success because it's so hard to find gold in eco- nomic quantities. However, it's a different business to build mines and to run them successfully. Successful exploration companies tend to get bought by bigger, producing com- panies. A lot of the producing companies are good at building mines and/or running mines but are often not the best at explo- ration. I thought: "Why couldn't we have both?" So we transformed Bema Gold into a successful builder and operator of mines, but retained our successful exploration team and entrepreneurial spirit. We were contrarians by going to Chile in 1988 when people said we were crazy. Pinochet was in power and a lot of compa- nies had lost money and projects in Latin America – it was viewed as a negative place to invest. Being a contrarian means being prepared to go where others won't. We found that Chile had been the largest copper producer since the early 20 th cen- LEFT: Clive Johnson. Photo by Tom Hawkins Photography. FAR LEFT: The just opened Fekola gold mine in southern Mali, West Africa. Photo courtesy B2Gold Corp.

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