Greatland Resources (ASX:GGP): This gold miner has both of the top 2 highest paid ASX 300 directors, and it didn’t happen by accident

Look at the board of Greatland Resources (ASX:GGP) and you’ll notice 2 names: Mark Barnaba and Elizabeth Gaines. Both also serve on the board of iron ore giant Fortescue (ASX:FMG), but they are also number one and number two for highest paid ASX 300 directors having taken home $4.52m and $1.88m respectively.

Now, yes, those amounts include Fortescue pay, but $3.3m of Barnaba’s pay consisted of Greatland board fees, and he also received a parcel of options. But how did this happen? The short answer is a combination of brilliant timing, a transformative acquisition, a soaring gold price, and a one-off structural quirk tied to the company’s mid-2025 listing on the Australian Securities Exchange.

But to understand the full picture, you need to go back to a small UK exploration company with a big idea and an even bigger asset hidden in the Western Australian desert.

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Greatland Resources (ASX:GGP): A junior that realised its dreams

Greatland began its corporate life as an AIM-listed exploration minnow on the London Stock Exchange, focused on precious and base metals with a portfolio of Australian projects. For years it was barely noticed. That changed in 2018 when the company, in a joint venture with Newcrest Mining, discovered Havieron. Havieron was (and is) a large-scale underground gold-copper deposit located about 45 kilometres east of the Telfer mine in Western Australia’s remote Paterson Province

Havieron was a genuine tier-one find. But Greatland, then a company without revenue, held only a 30% non-managing interest, with Newcrest (later acquired by Newmont) controlling the rest. The challenge was to convert that promising resource position into something more. To do that, the board concluded it needed serious Australian mining firepower.

In September 2022, Greatland appointed Mark Barnaba, an eminent natural resources investment banker and Deputy Chair of Fortescue Metals, as non-executive chairman and Elizabeth Gaines, former Fortescue chief executive, as deputy chair. The pair brought with them deep networks across Australian capital markets and the resources sector, and this is precisely what an AIM-listed UK entity needed to make the leap to Australia’s big leagues.

To attract and retain them, the company made a one-off grant of options in September 2022 (100 million to Barnaba and 55 million to Gaines) with an exercise price of 11.9 pence and an expiry date of August 2026. At the time, it seemed like a standard incentive arrangement. What nobody could quite anticipate was how spectacularly those options would move into the money.

The Newmont Deal Changed Everything

In December 2024, Greatland completed the acquisition of 100% ownership of the Telfer gold-copper mine and the remaining 70% interest in the Havieron project from Newmont subsidiaries. The acquisition price was US$475m. Almost overnight, Greatland went from a non-revenue-generating developer with a minority stake in a promising project to one of the more significant gold-copper producers in Australia.

The numbers that followed were remarkable. In the seven months from acquisition through to 30 June 2025, the company generated revenue of $961.3m and a maiden profit before tax of $441.9m, while operating cash flow reached $601.1m. By any measure, a striking return on an upfront acquisition cost of $540m.

Gold, of course, helped enormously. By the time of its ASX debut, the gold price had soared past US$5,000/oz, driven by central bank demand and geopolitical uncertainty, from US-China trade tensions to Middle East conflict. Australian miners, producing at costs well below that, were printing cash.

The Listing and the Payday

In June 2025, the corporate structure was overhauled. Following a court-approved UK scheme of arrangement, Greatland Resources Limited was admitted to trading on both the ASX and the London Stock Exchange’s AIM platform, with the listing of Greatland Gold plc on AIM simultaneously cancelled. The IPO raised A$490m at A$6.60 per share, with the company surging as much as 12% on debut.

Here was the catch for ASX governance standards: the ASX Corporate Governance Principles recommend that non-executive directors should not hold performance-based options as part of their remuneration. So, ahead of the listing, the company agreed to buy out the directors’ options. In consideration for the surrender of their options, holders received a cash payment of 6.64 pence per option, determined by an independent financial advisor using Black-Scholes-Merton methodology, with each holder required to reinvest 50% of the consideration in new shares.

The maths made Barnaba and Gaines the talk of the AFR’s remuneration tables. At 6.64 pence across his 100 million options, Barnaba received gross proceeds of £6.64m (~A$13.6m at prevailing exchange rates) before reinvesting half in shares. Gaines, with 55 million options at the same rate, received around £3.65m (~A$7.5m).

These were not ongoing salaries but one-time crystallisations of options that had been deeply in the money. This reflects both the successful execution of the Newmont acquisition and the extraordinary gold price tailwind. Framed as annual remuneration, as they would be in any annual report covering the year of listing, the figures made them the highest-paid non-executive directors in the ASX 300.

Since Then, and What Comes Next?

Since listing, Greatland has continued to perform. In the September 2025 quarter, the company produced 80,890oz of gold and 3,366t of copper, generating net revenue of A$476m and operating cash flow of A$284 million, lifting the cash balance to A$750m with no debt.

FY26 guidance calls for 260-310,000/oz of gold at an all-in sustaining cost of A$2,400 to A$2,800/oz, with approximately A$230-260m of capital expenditure focused on Telfer growth and early Havieron works. Based on first-half performance, management now expects production to trend towards the upper end of that guidance range, with all-in sustaining costs towards the lower end.

The bigger prize is Havieron itself. The December 2025 feasibility study confirmed Havieron holds an ore reserve of 38.5Mt at 2.63g/t gold and 0.33% copper, making it Australia’s third largest underground ore reserve. First gold production targeted 2.5 years after a final investment decision, which the company expects to take following receipt of key environmental approvals targeted in FY26. Pre-production capital expenditure is estimated at A$1.1bn, largely to be funded from Telfer’s cash flows and a committed A$500m debt facility.

As of the close of the December 2025 quarter, the company held A$948 m in cash with no debt. At current gold prices (hovering well above A$6,000/oz) the AISC margin is extraordinary – to put it mildly.

Conclusion

The story of Greatland Resources is, in many ways, the story of Australian gold in microcosm: a small UK exploration company with a hunch about a remote WA tenement, the recruitment of the right local talent at the right moment, a transformative acquisition from a retreating global major, and a gold price that did the rest.

That Barnaba and Gaines ended up atop the AFR’s director pay tables is less a product of excess than a measure of what happens when a well-structured incentive plan meets a decade-high commodity cycle.