Graham Boustred, who has died in Hermanus at the age of 95, was the deputy chair of the Anglo American Corporation in the 1980s and '90s.
He was an original entrepreneurial tycoon type who built up SA’s nascent steel and coal industry in the 1960s and ‘70s and was Anglo’s industrial tsar from 1983.
In 2001 Nicky Oppenheimer described him as “one of the greatest industrialists South Africa ever produced”.
Sipho Nkosi, the former CEO of coal company Exxaro, says that in the 1980s Boustred taught him everything he needed to know about mining and coal.
Boustred was cantankerous and a bit of a bully. The only way to work with him was to stand up to him or become one of his yes-men. He was notorious for riding people who didn’t stand up to him.
But he was unrivalled as someone who got things done. He was a doer, not a talker, a tough, hard-nosed, driving, intimidating man who didn’t mind whose ego or dignity he trampled on to achieve his goals.
No respecter of position or rank — it was said that the only person he respected was Harry Oppenheimer — he reduced many at Anglo, including senior executives, to nervous wrecks.
He once summoned the late Zach de Beer to appear before him. At the time De Beer, a former MP, was chair of Anglo subsidiary Southern Life, an executive director of Anglo and an Oppenheimer favourite.
Boustred made him cool his heels until he’d finished chairing an executive committee meeting. Then in front of his colleagues he gave De Beer an extraordinary tongue-lashing.
He thought he was spending too much on advertising, which Boustred considered a waste of money because it didn't build any power stations or mines.
He felt De Beer was too soft to be in business and should return to politics.
Boustred consolidated Anglo’s coal interests into Anglo American Coal, of which he was chair, and was the driver behind the creation of the Richards Bay Coal Terminal as well as of Anglo’s Highveld Steel & Vanadium project.
He became chair of the Anglo American Industrial Corporation in 1983.
It expanded massively under his leadership to contain the likes of Mondi, Highveld Steel, Scaw Metals, Columbus Stainless Steel, its extensive coal interests, construction companies like LTA, and many more.
It was a sprawling empire but he had a tight grip on it. He was not an easy-going delegator. He chose his people but they reported to him in detail and he knew exactly what was what.
In the end he got caught short by Anglo’s decision to list in London in 1999, shed its conglomerate status and become a focused global mining company.
This was the end of the industrial road for Anglo and for Boustred, who had to watch the companies he’d spent much of his working life building into very profitable entities being sold off much too cheaply, he believed.
He raged furiously against the anti-conglomerate sentiment pushed by analysts and shareholders.
“The greatest company in the world is GE,” he said in an interview with Business Day in 2009.
“Can you think of a company that’s more diverse? So why all the s*** about focus? The big shareholders want focus. I would have told them to f*** off.”
He hated the idea of a London listing and the emphasis on maximising short-term returns, and was scathing about executives he felt used the listing to get paid in hard currencies and acquire property in London.
He blamed Anglo’s subsequent misfortunes on these decisions.
In a bizarre interview with Business Day in 2009, replete with sexist invective, he attacked Cynthia Carroll, who had become Anglo’s first non-South African and first female CEO in 2007.
“This woman’s hopeless,” he said. “Anglo is a disaster. The board is a disaster.”
Boustred, who retired in 1997, was born on May 6 1925 in Johannesburg and matriculated at St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, where he was head boy.
He joined the South African Navy in 1943 and was seconded to the Royal Navy.
While on active service in the East he heard that he’d been awarded a Rhodes scholarship.
After the war he went to Trinity College, Oxford, where he read chemistry.
After Oxford he studied steel-making in Sheffield and joined Scaw Metals in Germiston. He was made MD by his father, William, who was the chair.
He built up the steel producer and in 1967 it was bought by Anglo.
Boustred is survived by his second wife, Frances, to whom he was married for 54 years, and five children.
His first wife, Joy, died of cancer when she was 32.
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