Vasile Frank Timiș (born 1964)[1] is a Romanian-Australian businessman living in London, with interests in mining and oil extraction industries.
[6] Timis was arrested twice for possession of heroin in the Eighties and was deemed "unsuitable" to be a director of a company by the Toronto Stock Exchange for failing to disclose those convictions.
According to Jurnalul Național, Timiș failed to declare this fact in the CV he published when he listed the company Gabriel Resources on the Toronto Stock Exchange, as required by law.
[8] In 1995, Timiș founded Gabriel Resources NL Australia, and in the autumn of the same year, the Romanian state-owned mining company "Regia Autonomă a Cuprului din Deva" (RAC) announced that it was searching for a partnership with a foreign company for the mining of precious metals from the tailings in Roșia Montană and Gurabarză-Brad.
However, Jurnalul Național claims that it has documents indicating a collaboration signed by RAC Deva and Gabriel Resources one day before the announcement was published, on 4 September 1995.
[9] The resulting project in Roșia Montană has been a source of much controversy, with local people lining up on both sides of the issue, and some national and international environmental groups joining the opposition.
Regal Petroleum, founded by Timiș in November 1996, was listed on the London Alternative Investment Market and owned some oil and gas resources in Romania and Ukraine.
The Regal board hoped that the company's survey team had found one of the largest oil deposits in Europe: up to a billion barrels.
In 2010, the company was still worth about £200m, and had cash reserves of £80m,[13] In February 2006, Regal lost its Ukraine gas production license in a trial but got it back through appeal one year later.
[14] In June 2005, an environmental group, Alburnus Maior, asked the Romanian Supreme Court, under the freedom of information laws, whether Timiș was under any investigations.
SLDC holds mineral rights over a third of the area of Sierra Leone in the northern part of the country,[18] including some important diamond fields and the Tonkolili & Marampa Iron Ore Projects.
Despite the best efforts of the team and management, the continued downturn in iron ore prices, slowing global growth and China's appetite and the Ebola crisis (which infected almost 15,000 and claimed 4,000 lives) left AMI exposed.
Shandong refused to release remaining funds (US$100m) and their lawyers Linklater's recognised a perfect opportunity to take over buying 75% of AMI shares at a grossly undervalued price and through a process that was anything but transparent.
AMI was operating as Shan Steel under Chinese leadership until they recently left the tonkolili project with the loss of all jobs created by Frank Timis and AML.
He remains the founder and a supportive shareholder but plays no other role[23] African Petroleum Corporation is a company with various oil and gas operations in West Africa, listed on the National Stock Exchange of Australia (NSX: AOQ) and Oslo Bors (APCL).
[24] Timiș is a non-executive director at International Petroleum Limited,[25] an Australian-domiciled, NSX-listed (NSX code: IOP),[26] oil and gas exploration and production company.
Timiș is CEO of Pan African Minerals Limited, which has various operations in Africa, including exploration of a large manganese deposit at Tambao in Burkina Faso.
The BBC alleged that payments received in 2017 totalling £670,000 from an offshore trust were described retrospectively as untaxable loans to avoid paying taxes on them.