There is a team of six very experienced executives covering mining, sustainability, forestry, seaweed aquaculture, information and data, SaaS, mathematical modelling and machine learning.
Peter Hollands was co-founder of Bloomsbury Minerals Economics (BME) in 1993 and is Chairman. He has a B.Sc. Geology (1974) from University College London (UCL) and worked initially in and around extractive industries, first in geophysics at UCL, next as a petroleum geologist in Libya, then in mining and metals market analysis. He worked for eleven years at CRU, finishing there as Research Manager, Copper Production. At BME he managed the copper market analysis, assisted entry into mathematical price modelling and took the subsidiary BME Price Models into hedge fund advisory services. In 2006, he started re-investing Bloomsbury’s hedge fund profits into other companies, initially into: Mining Journal and Mines & Money conferences (2006-08); the original FastMarkets (2008-12); IntierraRMG (2009-16) and Roskill (2010-21); and currently into mining environmental research: Skarn (from 2020) and Minviro (from 2023); forestry FinTech: Xilva (from 2022) & seaweed farming: Cascadia (from 2021); and SaaS: Mutinex (from 2022).
Simon Benney is a Non-executive Director of BME and Managing Director of its Bloomsbury Information Capital subsidiary. He has an M.Eng. degree from Imperial College, London (1991) and an MBA from SDA Bocconi, Italy (1995). He worked for nine years for consultants Arthur Andersen then McKinsey & Co and was a senior executive for twenty years in heavy industries: Airbus, EADS, ArcelorMittal and RioTinto. He predominantly held the position of global CIO and Chief Data & Analytics Officer in these companies and was responsible for leading business transformations, leveraging technology to drive shareholder value. He was also CEO of various of those companies’ subsidiaries. In 2019, Simon founded Kernow Advisory sarl, of Luxembourg, to provide Board and C-suite advisory services in technology, digital, data and cybersecurity. He is a Board member of Minviro and Mutinex, and a Senior Advisor to McKinsey & Co, the European Investment Bank and HCL Technologies.
Martin Hollands is a Director of BME’s subsidiary Bloomsbury Natural Capital. He has a B.Sc. degree in Biology from University College London (1976) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Environment and Geography from the University of Hertfordshire (2011). He has worked for forty years at the interface between environmental conservation and business sustainability. His experience covers mining, energy, forestry, agriculture and tropical commodities. He has chaired both Rio Tinto’s and also BP’s Biodiversity Advisory Groups, and is heavily involved in international policy, representing both civil society and governments. He is a Member both of the Advisory Board of the Concrete Sustainability Council and the Strategy & Objectives Working Group at the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber. He is BME’s Director on the Board of Swiss company Xilva and is Senior Advisor on Ecosystem Services and Restorative Aquaculture to Cascadia Seaweed of British Columbia.
James Griffiths is Senior Advisor, Forest Sector to Bloomsbury Natural Capital. He has a BA International Relations from Victoria University NZ (1979) and MA Political Science (1982) University of Hawaii. He has worked forty years in government, business and non-government sectors primarily with an international focus, including as a global business advocate for sustainable development (Managing Director, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Switzerland), trade association executive (Chief Executive, New Zealand Forest Industries Council), diplomat (New Zealand Consul & Trade Commissioner, New York), trade negotiator (Executive Officer, Department of Trade & Industry, Wellington, NZ), forest products marketer (Product Manager, New Zealand Forest Products Ltd, Auckland, NZ), assistant lecturer (University of Hawaii) and industrial policy advisor (Department of Trade & Industry, Wellington, NZ).
Adam Sotowicz has a Ph.D. in Chemistry (organic peroxides) from University College London (1982) He is the former Manager of Mathematical Modelling and I.T. at BME and is now Managing Director and majority owner of BME’s associate company, Metal Price Analytics (BME has a 25% stake). Adam has extensive mathematical modelling and machine learning experience. He has created very successful forecasting models of the LME-traded base metals’ cash prices and forward spreads, for use by producers, consumers, processors and traders, and cash prices models of crude oil and gold. He led BME Price Models’ very successful hedge fund advisory work, which included the creation of fundamentals-based trading models and expert systems that complemented technical analysis. His latest model is of the chrome concentrates price, developed for SwapX of South Africa, the global chrome ore trading platform. Methods used by Adam include LASSO and Ridge Regression, Regression Splines, Classification and Regression Trees.
Barbara Sotowicz was a co-founder with Peter Hollands of Bloomsbury Minerals Economics (BME) in 1993. She was initially the Marketing Director, and is today BME’s Managing Director. Barbara is also a Director of BME’s two investment subsidiaries, Bloomsbury Natural Capital and Bloomsbury Information Capital. Barbara has a B.Sc. degree in Geology (1975) from University College, London and an M.Sc. in Crystallography (1976) from Birkbeck College, London. After her master’s degree, Barbara undertook a number of years’ research on Kimberlite minerals in the Crystallography Department of University College, London. Barbara has worked for the Geological Information Branches of both British Petroleum and the Occidental Consortium. She has extensive general management experience. Barbara has a parallel career in martial arts and is an Aikido Sixth Dan and Shidoin.