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Guy Scott (1944-2026) This article was written by Anthony Lipmann. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own. In 2012, I narrowly missed meeting Guy Scott in London on a visit to meet investors. He was due to address an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Zambian and Malawian agriculture and development. My hope was to grab him to talk about the sulphur emissions blighting the lives of Zambians living next to Mopani’s Mufulira Mine and Smelter complex. To

This article was written by Anthony Lipmann. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own. I have two friends called Peter. Peter no.1 grew up in the same town as me (Walton-on-Thames), then went to the same public school and the same university. Peter no. 2 went to the local school in Walton-on-Thames called Rydens. Peter no.1 did English with me at university where a young Richard Curtis was in his tutorial group and went from there directly into merchant banking.

This article was written by Anthony Lipmann. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own. Every now and then Britain appears on the brink of recapturing an atom or two of its mining past – and not just in the imaginative realm of Poldark… Such a moment came in 2015 when Wolf Minerals of Australia exhumed Victorian-era geological data about strata in the Southwest near Plymouth, suggesting one of the largest tungsten resources outside China. Investment followed,

The history of the Congo in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not a happy one. Between 1885 and 1908 it was a personal fiefdom of Léopold II of Belgium, and then was subsumed as a colony into the Belgian state. That period when it was the Congo Free State, ruled as a separate kingdom from Belgium by the king, Léopold, was particularly brutal. Léopold’s private police force, the Force Publique, was established to maintain order, and initially to try to oust the Za

This article was written by Anthony Lipmann. All views and opinions expressed are strictly his own. It seems obvious we are all in dire straits now – so it made me think of some of the other straits that have been critical to mankind. The straits of Gib, Magellan, Malacca, Bosphorous, Bougainville, Bering, Cabot, Cook, Messina etc; most of them, significant to the world of trade and of course conflict. A geographical pinch point, as Damian Valdez suggested recently in an ar