[1] After the end of the First World War, Beatty built up a substantial portfolio of mining interests, many of them in Africa, but others in Serbia and in Siberia.
The countries in which it operated included the US, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Burma, Australia, South Africa, Angola, Tanzania, Northern Rhodesia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, French Guinea, Botswana, Hungary, Russia, Yugoslavia and the USSR.
One of the key early building blocks of the mining finance house was its interests in the copper belt of Central Africa.
The Rhodesian Selection Trust Limited (RST) was a copper mining corporation which operated in the Copperbelt region of Northern Rhodesia.
The company was renamed Roan Selection Trust in 1964 after the break-up of the Central African Federation and the independence of Northern Rhodesia as the new state of Zambia.
One of its major successes was its involvement in the early phases of the country's iron ore expansion through the Mt Newman discovery.
[7] It was noticeable that Agnew was initially largely in the hands of London investors and that the sole Australian connection was an indirect 2.4% stake in the project held by Selcast Exploration, a locally listed satellite of Selection Trust.