Pnina Feldman is rich – with nothing to show for it

The Advertiser – Adelaide 19/04/97 By Ian Lovett

The sister of corporate high-flyer Joe Gutnick proved yesterday that diamonds really are a girl’s best friend when her new company made a spectacular debut on the sharemarket.

In scenes reminiscent of the Poseidon days in the 1920’s the 20c shares in Pnina Feldman’s Diamond Rose company soared to $1.75.

At that high point, Mrs Feldman – who owns 57.5 per cent of the company – was worth $44.6 million on paper.

When trading finished, the shares were selling at $1.29 – still more than six times their issue price. All that from a company which has yet to find a diamond.

With four of her daughters, six rabbis and baby grand-daughter Rose, whose name the company borrowed, Mrs Feldman watched the action on the Australian Stock Exchange in Sydney.

“Diamond Rose is truly blessed,” she said. “But I’ll be even happier when we find diamonds”

The company has a batch of exploration leases.

Mrs Feldman started the company to help her husband, Rabbi Pinchus, fund a centre which supports education and welfare.

“I only hope never to make so much money that my head spins so much so I get diverted from helping the community,” she said.

Ms Feldman says her motivation in floating the company is to find the 12 gemstones of the breastplate worn by the High Priest in the Temple of Jerusalem 3000 years ago, as describes in The Bible.

Perpetual Trustees, which landed a stake of four million shares in the 10 million share float, is believed to have made a $3.5 million profit already on its $800,000 investment, selling 3.9 million shares at $1.10 each.

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Why not smile? Pnina Feldman

She has 11 children and runs a high school. On Friday she made $77m. Why not smile?

The Sydney Morning Herald By Rod Myer

Pnina Feldman, high school principal and mother of 11 children, made $77.4 million on Friday with her first foray into the world of high finance when her gemstone exploration company, Diamond Rose, listed on the stock exchange.

Feldman, sister of the gold magnate Joseph Gutnick, was low key about her stockmarket coup in which the company’s shares reached a high of $1.75 and closed at $1.29.

She says modestly: “Everyone around me is happy so I’m happy too.”

Her personal involvement in the mining industry began almost by chance three years ago. “Someone I knew wanted to (sell) a lease to my brother and couldn’t get through to him so he asked if I could give him an introduction,” she says. “My brother was in Perth and he said he had so many projects he couldn’t look at it but if it was interesting I should look at it myself. I did, and that’s how it started.”

Small beginnings maybe, but since then Feldman has built up a portfolio of 17 diamond, gemstone, precious-metal and base-metal tenements, mainly across north-western Australia. Under the terms of the float, her private company Vageta pass rights to these to Diamond Rose in return for a 57 per cent stake in the public company. Diamond Rose will pay $2.5 million over the first two years of its life,

Pnina Feldman’s CV may appear a little short of conventional business experience. However, she says close involvement with her brother’s interests and a strong background in administration gained while building up Sydney’s Yeshiva High School from scratch helped her make the transition to the mining industry.

“It wasn’t difficult at all. Sometimes you just have a flair for things. I love what I’m doing and the family has been so involved for years (in mining) that I instinctively understand what to do,” she says

Her Yeshiva High venture, like her stock exchange project, has been a success story, she says, with education authorities equating its performance with the best schools in New South Wales.

Australia’s mining exploration industry has a rich and colourful history dotted with boom-bust cycles, larger-than-life characters, wild optimism, avarice and fraud. Feldman says she brings other attributes to the industry: spirituality and altruism.

Like her brother, Feldman is a devout orthodox Jew and follower of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Schneerson.

She says her main motivation for launching Diamond Rose is to fund the community work of her husband, a rabbi in charge of an educational and social welfare organization in the eastern Sydney suburb of Bondi.

“He lives his life for other people and has taken me along that path. I see this as an opportunity to help him … to have his deficit covered. I want to bring in spiritual significance because that’s been my life and I can’t separate myself from that,” she says.

Investors will be pleased to know they figure in the equation: “I want investors to make a lot of money and then if there’s something left over for myself, I’m also happy.”

Investors who include the international financier George Soros and James Packer, have many reasons to be happy after Friday’s launch.

Why gemstones? In the prospectus, Feldman says she would like to discover sizeable quantities of the 12 varieties of gemstone embedded in the breastplate worn by the high priest in Jerusalem temple nearly 3000 years ago. The key stone in that breastplate was a diamond, she says.

In an omen that could help explain the huge success, Diamond Rose was listed on the birthday of the late Rebbe Schneerson.

However, skeptics should note, on the eve of the Jewish Passover, commemorating the liberation of ancient Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, that a Diamond Rose director and former RSL president, Sir William Keys, is also a board member of Pharaoh Metals.

For those seeking more down-to-earth reasons to back her judgment, Feldman says simply “if you can have 11 kids you can do everything”.

Pnina Feldman's Diamond Hunt

The Weekend Star 1-2 September 2001 By Hannah Ross

THERE could be diamonds in the hills near Nimbin.

A Sydney-based mining and exploration company believes the hills to the east of Nimbin could be rich with precious gemstones including diamonds and sapphires. With luck, the company believes it could become a multi-billion dollar investment.

The company, Diamond Rose, is seeking a licence from the NSW Department of Mineral Resources to prospect in a 222-square kilometer area encompassing private land and parts of the Nightcap Ranges.

Diamond Rose manager Sholom Feldman said the company applied for the licence following reports from members of the public and prospectors of interesting minerals in the area.

“We’re not in the habit of applying for licences in areas we don’t think we’ll find anything in,” Mr Feldman said.

He said the company paid ‘a few thousand dollars’ to apply for the licence, which had not yet been granted.

A spokesperson for the Department of Mineral Resources said it received Diamond Rose’s application in May, but no date was set for a decision on its approval.

Mr Feldman didn’t think his company’s application would spark a local prospecting frenzy.

“It’s usually not that easy to go into your back yard and dig up a diamond. It’s quite a science. To the uninitiated eye, anything you pick up from the ground just looks like dirt,” he said.

What’s more, he said, all underground minerals officially belonged to the government.

The company has to pay royalties to the government on any precious discoveries.

And the miners can’t just turn up and start digging on private land – they have to negotiate access and financial rewards to private landowners on whose land valuable minerals are found.

“Generally landowners are pretty good, but if they don’t want to let us on their land, they don’t have to,” Mr Feldman said.

He said if the company was granted its licence, it would spend several thousand dollars carrying out initial geological surveys. It positive, these could lead to further exploration work in the area.

“We could be heavily surprised and it could become a multi-billion dollar scheme. Of course if we found a large deposit of diamonds we would be happy,” he said.

He said the company, whose exploration projects include areas of the Kimberley and Pilbara regions of Western Australia, rehabilitated any land it worked on to its original condition.

“Part of our focus ensures minimal if any environmental impact and very thorough rehabilitation. There are very strict environmental guidelines in place,” he said.

The guidelines include the prohibition of any prospecting in National Parks.

Gold fever strikes diamond junior

Mining Times Newspaper June 2002

Diamond explorer Diamond Rose hopes to replicate the success of fellow explorer Striker Resources’ early results by forming a gold exploration division.

It will take advantage of exciting gold discoveries in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, recently announced by De Beers and acted on by Striker and AngloGold.

“In the light of current renewed interest in the gold sector in general and the recent gold discovery by De Beers in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in particular, Diamond Rose has reviewed its own data and tenements for gold potential,” the company’s chairwoman and executive director, Pnina Feldman, said.

The as-yet unnamed gold division, to be a wholly controlled entity of Diamond Rose, will focus on existing gold anomalies within and adjacent to the company’s present tenement holdings in the Kimberley region of WA.

The new company hopes to develop a portfolio of high quality Australian gold projects, particularly in known gold producing regions.

It has expressed an interest in the Leonora region, from which more than 35 million ounces of gold resources have been discovered.

“Geologists who have been associated with discoveries in the region and have a thorough knowledge in the area are working with Diamond Rose and have now added projects from that area to the company’s gold portfolio.” Feldman said.

She said it was hoped the new gold division would broaden the base of the company, particularly at a time when gold is again a popular metal.

“The company remains committed to vigorously exploring for commercial deposits of diamonds through the company’s prospective portfolio of diamond exploration projects and also through its participation in the promotion of the IPO of Kimberley Rose Australia.”

The company has reviewed its diamond tenements for gold and found that certain fault structures and associated alteration are part of an epithermal style system, which may host potentially widespread gold mineralisation.

Consultant geologist John Ceplecha reviewed areas in the Kimberley where visible gold grains were recovered identifying further similar structures and geological settings in the Central Kimberley adjacent to the Kimberley Rose tenements that may host potentially widespread gold mineralisation.

As a result of this review, Diamond Rose has applied for an additional four maximum size ELAs.

Acting on the recommendations its consultants, the company has applied for another two exploration licences that straddle the Mt Margaret Mineral Field (Mt Malcolm District) and the North Coolgardie Mineral Field (Menzies District) which is from seven to 23 km west-northwest of Leonora.