Who We Are
Management & Directors
John D. Kuhns
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer
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Mr. Kuhns has founded and led five previous companies involved with the infrastructure development business from formation to maturity, including most recently China Hydroelectric Corporation, the largest foreign-owned electric power company in China, which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. He has also founded and led three Wall Street investment banking firms registered with FINRA as broker dealers and registered investment advisors.
Mr. Kuhns received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in 1972, where he was captain of the varsity football team and is a member of the University’s Athletic Hall of Fame; a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Chicago in 1975, where he was also an undergraduate teaching assistant in sculpture and drawing and the art critic for the Maroon, the university’s newspaper; and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1977.
Mr. Kuhns has also authored the following novels: “They Call Me Ishmael,” “China Fortunes,” “Ballad of a Tin Man” and “South of the Clouds.”
Mary E. Fellows
Director, Executive Vice President
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She has held positions on the boards of several domestic and international companies. A shareholder and senior executive officer at Kuhns Brothers, a broker-dealer and registered investment advisor, Ms. Fellows has more than twenty years of experience providing financial advisory and strategic management services to corporate issuers and investment advisory services to financial institutions and high-net-worth individuals.
Ms. Fellows attended Regis College, received her bachelor’s degree in Science from Teikyo Post University, and graduated from the AMP program of Harvard Business School.
Anthony Dixon
Director
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Mr. Dixon received a M.Sc. degree with distinction in Sustainable Energy Futures (engineering) from Imperial College, London in 2010 and co-authored a published academic paper on Luminescent and Geometric Solar Concentrators for Building Integrated Photovoltaics. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow, a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Physics and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Western Australia.
Claude Bejet
Director
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Claude Bejet is a Director. He is a private investor specializing in mining stocks and emerging markets who is a well-known figure in the international precious metal community. Since the late 1980’s, he has been writing for leading stock exchange magazines in France (La Vie Française, La Vie Financière, Money Week, Agora Publications France), Switzerland (Le Temps) and the United States (Forbes Magazine). He regularly speaks at most mining investment conferences including the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC, Toronto, the largest mining show in the world), and Mines and Money London. Every year, he moderates a panel of junior companies at the Precious Metals Summit in Zurich. He is also keynote speaker, twice a year, in Geneva and Zurich for the Swiss Mining Institute. Mr. Bejet co-founded the Swiss Mining Club, a Geneva based investment club with prominent investors. He is known for having recommended young or out of favor gold mining ventures around the world that became very successful companies. Mr. Bejet was educated at Paris Business School (ESCP) from 1969-1972, and received Licenses in Philosophy and Sociology (1969-1972), and a License in Psychology (1973-74), all from Paris University.
Ian Smith
Director
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Peter Georgiopoulos
Director
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Mr. Georgiopoulos is a widely recognized shipping entrepreneur with extensive experience in the sale, purchase, and chartering of vessels who has organized and led as Chief Executive Officer several shipping companies. From 1987 to 1990, he served as an investment banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert. He holds an MBA from Dartmouth College.
Philippe Berman
Director
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Mr. Berman is a Director. Mr. Berman worked at Goldman Sachs & Co. from 1977 to 1981 and then joined Bain & Co., to work in the London office where he worked on corporate strategy. He then created Euroventure Management Consultant, a New York-based venture-capital firm dedicated to the purchase and restructuring of medium-size French industrial corporations. Subsequently, he opened an office in Paris to invest in European real estate opportunities. Mr. Berman graduated from Harvard University Business School in 1977.
Key Bougainville Team Members
Lawrence Queen
Senior Consulting Geologist
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Mr. Queen has over 35 years’ experience worldwide in the mineral exploration industry. He has a BSc in geology from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, Socorro, USA, and an MSc in geology from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, USA. He is a member of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (26 years) and a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists. Mr. Queen is Competent Person for reporting exploration results and resource estimation under the JORC Code and Guidelines and a Qualified Person for N143-101. For five years, Mr. Queen was the Principal Economic Geologist for the Geological Survey of Papua New Guinea.
Tete Omas
Manager, Lakeville Mines, Numa Numa’s mining subsidiary
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Mr. Omas is an expert in all aspects of gold mining, including mining assessment and operations, as well as the fabrication of gold extraction equipment. Born in Finschhafen in the Morobe Province of PNG, Mr. Omas began working at an early age with his father, Mr. Omas Genora, on the family mining lease, a hard rock mine at Mt. Kaindi. (Mr. Omas Genora was the first person from PNG to own a mining lease, which prior to that time had all been owned by foreigners.) Before joining Lakeville Mines, Tete Omas was formerly employed with the Mineral Resource Authority of the Papua New Guinea, the PNG governmental department in charge of PNG’s mining sector (the “MRA”). Most recently with the MRA, Mr. Omas was a technical officer in its Small Scale Mining Branch.