When Jia Tianjiang, one of the richest men in north-western China, was pulled into a corruption probe in 2018, executives thousands of miles away at Jersey-based Consolidated Minerals began to panic.
Not only had Mr Jia’s company Tian Yuan just bought the minerals group, one of the world’s largest manganese miners, less than a year earlier; he also had immediately used it to guarantee a $450m loan from a state-owned Chinese bank — nearly double ConsMin’s net assets.
“There was considerable concern at the top of the company that the loan guarantee was putting Consolidated Minerals in a precarious financial position, not least because it represented nearly twice the net assets of the business,” one person close to the company said.
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