Former Belmoral president busy with other projects

Mining executive J. Malcolm Slack isn’t running Belmoral Mines any more, but he’s not out of mining. The son and grandson of gold miners has other projects on the go, and has developed another interest to occupy his non-mining time, farming.

Slack, who has worked for Lac Minerals (1981-83) and Noranda Inc. (1970-81) at the senior management level and who went back to school in the late 1960s to obtain his MBA, wasn’t after the presidency of Belmoral when the job came open. “When I went to Belmoral, I wasn’t looking for a job,” he told The Northern Miner in an interview.

He said he was asked to help in the reorganization and refinancing of the Toronto-based company. “Always being an optimist, it looked like a fairly simple task,” he said with a smile on his face.

During the past few years, the company, with Slack in the president’s chair and current Belmoral chairman Kenneth Dalton playing a key role as chief financial officer, unburdened itself of its debt; turned its first annual profit (in 1986); and unloaded, by way of a private placement, two blocks of shares belonging to the Continental Illinois Bank (Canada) and representing up to 27.4% of Belmoral’s equity.

Belmoral, which owns and operates two producing gold mines and a processing mill in the Val d’Or, Que., area, and has exploration interests in a number of properties, currently boasts cash reserves of more than $30 million.

In October of this year, Slack resigned. “It (Belmoral) was in good order, my job was finished and it was time to move on,” he said. Timmins native

Born and raised in Timmins, Ont., Slack, 53, has been involved in mining all his life. During summers as a teenager he worked for a number of different mining companies in the province’s northeast. He attended the Haileybury School of Mines, worked for a mining firm, studied economics at the undergraduate level at the University of Western Ontario, entered the working world again with yet another mining company, and then undertook graduate studies at Western before assuming his first senior- management job, with Noranda. His MBA research paper, on the mining industry, dealt, he said, with “sizing up the ’60s and anticipating the ’70s.”

Over the years and with all the moving around, Slack and his wife, Carol, have managed to raise a family of four, two girls and two boys.

Still in the process of deciding “which businesses I’ll pursue” when The Northern Miner interviewed him, Slack has been working, in the area of strategic planning, with a private company involved in building mills at a low cost. Part of what he is into with the firm involves the financing and rationalizing of smaller properties into larger projects. He also serves as a Belmoral director and adviser. Funding available

There is still plenty of money available to the gold-mining industry, he said. At the same time, he feels there are more gold prospects now than there are people around to develop them and he is confident the necessary financing can be raised as required.

Once familiar with most gold properties in North America, Slack says he has trouble remembering all the projects currently on the go in northeastern Ontario.

Slack now lives on farming property northwest of Toronto which he and his family bought in 1980. A 25-acre purchase has since grown to 275 acres, and among his current livestock are beef cattle, horses and sheep.