On 4 November 2024, the board of Mineral Resources ($MIN) (ASX:MIN) announced that founder and managing director Chris Ellison would leave the company within 12 to 18 months, after an internal investigation found he'd misused company resources and failed to disclose a financial interest in British Virgin Islands entities — including one that sold a MinRes subsidiary roughly $4m of mining equipment. The board fined him $8.8m, put nearly $10m of planned pay at risk, and chair James McClements said the "actions, decisions and behaviours of Mr Ellison have been profoundly disappointing and require sanction and penalty." Ellison had already voluntarily disclosed the offshore income to the ATO in 2021 and paid almost $4m in back taxes in 2023. The stock shed 9.63% that day.
That's the fact the question in our inbox is built on: MinRes shares since that announcement have gone on to roughly quadruple off their subsequent low, and the stock sat near a 52-week high of $74.94 in recent weeks, last changing hands around $66.29 — a 72.7% trailing-12-month return. If you squint, that looks like the market cheering Ellison's exit. It didn't happen that way, and it's worth being precise about why.
A company creates an ethics-and-governance committee to fix its ethics-and-governance problem. Two-thirds of that committee resign within six months. Sit with that before you credit anyone for a clean-up.
It got much worse before it got better. MinRes's FY2025 result, reported the following August, swung from a $125m profit to a $904m loss, driven by the lithium-price collapse, asset writedowns and the cost of the governance mess itself. In May 2025, two of the three directors on the newly formed ethics-and-governance committee — reportedly the ones most critical of Ellison's conduct — resigned, leaving independent director Denise McComish as the committee's sole remaining member. MinRes shares closed that week at $17.21, down more than 75% from a year earlier. ASIC opened its own investigation into the related-party dealings. That was the actual bottom, and it had far more to do with a company in crisis than with anyone finding a graceful way out the door.
The recovery from there is real, and it isn't a governance story. Onslow Iron reached nameplate capacity in 2026, MinRes posted record Mining Services throughput of 341 million tonnes for the financial year, and lithium prices found a floor as part of the broader 2026 metals cycle lifting gold, copper and battery-metal names across the board. That combination is what took the stock from roughly $17 to the mid-$60s — an operating and commodity-price recovery, running in parallel with, not because of, the Ellison situation.
Because here's what actually happened to the exit: nothing. Investor presentation materials in July 2025 let slip that the mid-2026 departure timeline was "under review" and would be decided in "the best interests of shareholders" — hedge fund L1 Capital and others had been arguing publicly that Ellison was too valuable to lose. By the November 2025 AGM, the board formally scrapped the deadline altogether, replacing it with a vague "three-stage" succession plan carrying no fixed date. New chair Malcolm Bundey defended the reversal as avoiding "rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline" in favour of "a rigorous, well-managed process rather than an 'event.'" Then, in May 2026, with no successor named and no date on the calendar, Ellison sold 1.75 million of his own shares for $122.4m at $69.98 apiece — the stock fell as much as 7.1% intraday to $65.16 on the news.
The Take (conviction 4/5). So: who's sad to see him go? Nobody, because he hasn't gone, and as of this week there's no deadline compelling him to. The people who actually left were the two governance-committee directors most willing to hold him to account — not Ellison. The board that promised shareholders a credible succession process instead delivered a fine, an ASIC investigation still open, a gutted ethics committee, a scrapped deadline, and a managing director who's been the largest individual seller of his own company's stock this year. None of that is priced into a 72.7% one-year return; the iron ore ramp and the lithium recovery are. Those are genuinely good things happening at MinRes, and we're not arguing otherwise. But conflating a commodity-cycle rally with a governance fix is exactly the mistake a shareholder register with this much institutional money should know better than to make. The overhang didn't get resolved. It got outrun by the metals cycle — for now.