Word: copperizing
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...know what an F.O.B. is in Washington?" asked James Moffett, CEO of Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold, the giant mining company based in New Orleans, in a recent newspaper interview. "It's friends of Bill. That's how you get contracts with the U.S. government. And before that, it was friends of Bush. And before that...
...mine, developed under the auspices of the Suharto regime. A giant crater scooped out of a mountainside in the jungles of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea, the $60 billion mother lode contains one of the world's largest single deposits of copper and gold...
...business cronies. Indeed, Suharto interests own a multimillion-dollar stake in the Grasberg mine, which surely did not hurt Moffett's effort to maintain mining rights there on favorable terms. The deal was so sweet, in fact, that Freeport has long been the world's lowest-cost producer of copper, a key industrial metal...
...strict capitalists among Freeport's shareholders might be happier were that the case. The company's stock last week closed at about $14, down from $36 three years ago. Low copper and gold prices, which the company obviously can't control, clearly have hurt; but some shareholders also complain that despite a cost-cutting campaign dubbed "Hunker Down and Go," Moffett's 1998 compensation of $4.5 million plus stock options is out of line with Freeport's sagging performance...
...minded parties capture the majority of votes, as looks likely, and the military does not intervene, which seems plausible, popular resentment over the company's connections with Suharto might encourage the new government to re-evaluate even the revised contracts, or to further jack up royalty payments, just as copper prices seem to be turning up. That in turn could erode the firm's low-cost structure. Even worse, Jim-Bob Moffett's old friends in high places would no longer be there to help...