![Mihran Shemesian (left) dining with Greenland Minerals and Energy director Jeremy Whybrow.](http://web.archive.org./web/20140723045922im_/http://images.smh.com.au/2009/09/24/750462/420_Shemesian-420x0.jpg)
Mihran Shemesian (left) dining with Greenland Minerals and Energy director Jeremy Whybrow.
SACKED cops, drunken geologists, underworld figures and pirates - it's amazing who pops up in the business deals of mining prospector Mihran Shemesian.
The man is better known to Full Disclosure readers as ''Mick Manynames'' because there are more than a dozen different spellings of his name on official documents.
His latest deal just might attract the attention of the Takeovers Panel, as companies that Shemesian controls seem to own more than 20 per cent of listed Greenland Minerals and Energy - beyond the threshold that would require a takeover bid.
Best known by its sharemarket code of GGG, the company has a tenement in Greenland that is prospective for uranium and rare earths. The problem is, the anti-uranium party won the recent election in Greenland.
But even that hasn't put a dampener on the GGG share price. It has touched highs of 65¢ this year.
The major shareholder in GGG is GCM Nominees, which is controlled by Shemesian. It has 35 million shares, or 15.7 per cent, of the stock.
Shemesian also controls a ''corporate advisory'' outfit in the United Arab Emirates called Gravner.
Last year Gravner was granted 37 million options in Boss Energy, as part of a deal that involved former Victoria Police sergeant Joseph Obeid. In 1998, Obeid was dismissed from the police after being found guilty of five of seven disciplinary charges against him. He has since worked for Range Resources, another Shemesian deal.
GGG is paying Gravner $20,000 a month in fees, plus $20,000 a month in expenses on a three-year contract worth more than $1.4 million. Gravner also owns GGG shares and, at July 30 this year, GCM and Gravner together controlled 45 million shares of GGG, or 20.57 per cent of the issued capital.
Full Disclosure has kept an eye on Shemesian ever since he turned up at an Abu Dhabi prison back in 2007 to bail out Jupiter Mines director David Evans, one half of the ''bananas in pyjamas'' pair that imbibed a little too much before getting on an Etihad Airways plane.
Evans and his mate from Jupiter, fellow geologist Jeremy Snaith, ran amok mid-flight in their first-class pyjamas, were arrested on landing, and picked up the moniker ''B1 and B2'' as a result.
Since then we have tracked Shemesian's investments through such listed companies as Boss Energy, Range Resources, Artemis Resources, Aztec Resources, Contact Resources and Cape Lambert Iron Ore.
It seems Shemesian isn't a fan of blue-chip stocks.
Range owns the oil rights to the Somalian pirate centre of Puntland. Cape Lambert needed Mick Gatto and his mate John Khoury to fly to London a few months back to sort out an ownership mess.
The second-biggest shareholder in GGG is a company called Westrip, which is a joint-venture partner of GGG in Greenland and helped broker a funding deal with Shemesian back in January.
Westrip is controlled by Greg Barnes, who is also in some strife. He is embroiled in a legal battle with Chameleon Mining and its chairman, Benny Elias, over tenements that Murchison Metals bought in 2004, when Barnes was a director.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission has accused Barnes of providing false and misleading information in relation to Chameleon's $3 million float in 2003. He has been committed to stand trial on four criminal charges.
Westrip sold the royalty rights to one of GGG's projects to Shemesian in 2007, and they went into a company he controlled called Hackleton.
GGG's board has since announced that it will issue 15.5 million shares to buy back a fifth of those royalty rights - which surely means those shares will go to a party controlled by Shemesian.
That puts a total of 60,500,000 shares in the possible control of Shemesian, or 25 per cent of the issued stock. GGG managing director Roderick McIllree was overseas yesterday but executive director Simon Cato took our call. So, do you know Mick Shemesian, we asked? ''I've met him,'' Cato said.
Asked what percentage of GGG is controlled by Shemesian, Cato said: ''I don't know, you'd have to ask him.''
To show what a happy relationship Shemesian has with GGG's board, here (left) is a picture of him dining with director Jeremy Whybrow at Restaurant Klara in Greenland this year.
Wonder if the shareholders picked up the bill for that one, or did it come out of Gravner's expenses?
Stocks a la francais
AFTER nearly two months, former Wilson HTM lead bank analyst Brett Le Mesurier has re-emerged. Known for his probing questions of Macquarie Group, Le Mesurier has started his own independent research house with three other former Wilson HTM colleagues, including the broker's former head of institutional sales, Tony Davison.
The independent research shop named Axiome Equities invokes the term axiom, a ''self-evident truth'' - although Le Mesurier says he is using the French spelling.
The research house this week secured its financial services licence, and Axiome is preparing its inaugural report on the nation's banking sector.
When contacted by Full Disclosure, Le Mesurier was coy.
''It will be about which banks you should invest in and why,'' is all he would say.
Axiome is based in Sydney's Governor Phillip Tower, just a short lift ride from any Wilson HTM staffers who want to make the move.