2010 Oz Minerals AGM transcript

Stephen Mayne: I would like to speak against Brian's re-election for a couple of reasons. It's been a year since we sold the majority of our assets. There is issues around history on the class actions, but there is a not a great deal of complexity or history around Prominent Hill, that Brian in particular, would contribute in a really really special way to.

My other reason for making this point is that Brian is a director of Sigma Pharmaceutical, which has just gone through it's own near death experience of share price falling by half, and if I believe the press he's up for re-election at the AGM next month, and he is going to become chairman of a very troubled company.

If that eventuates, I think that would be an appropriate time to lighten the rest of your portfolio, and the most appropriate one to lighten would probably be this one, given the history, and then you can really roll your sleeves up and focus on turning around Sigma, which will require an enormous amount of attention.

We do have an issue in Australia with too few people, particularly blokes, doing too much. It is not a good look that this board has no women on it. I do think you need to get with the program, there's more pressure than ever before on gender diversity on boards, and I do think that we need to continue this process of turnover of directors associated with past poor performance.

Bryan would be an appropriate candidate for that in light of forthcoming extra duties, and I will be interested to see what the proxies say today as to whether any of the burnt shareholders of the past are expressing any views on what happened.

Chairman: Thanks for those comments. I will make a comment a little later on gender diversity because it is something I thought we might deal with in general business, Stephen, if you don't mind?

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