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”.