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November 2015
MODERN MINING
37
CONSULTANTS/
PROJECT HOUSES
feature
Patrick Willis (left) and Jim Pooley pictured at Bara’s Johannesburg offices.
Jim Pooley (centre) on site at the Bisie tin project located in the DRC’s North Kivu Province.
With him are Jamie Anderson (Exploration Manager for project owner, Alphamin Resources)
and Mark Presbury (Sales Consultant, Capital Africa).
ones that used to exist have now been acquired
by bigger groups.”
Pooley points out that due to the dearth
of work in the mining sector, some of the big
project houses and consulting firms are increas-
ingly intruding into Bara’s market space. “The
problem here, at least from a client’s perspec-
tive, is that these big organisations simply can’t
match Bara on price as they’re carrying too
many overheads. Also, big groups tend to keep
their ‘A’ teams for big blue chip clients. Smaller
clients will simply not receive the same close
attention.”
While Bara in South Africa is the bigger part
of Bara Consulting, the UK office – established
in late 2013 – has also enjoyed considerable
success. Says Willis: “We’ve built up a client
base which primarily consists of exploration
and mining companies listed on London’s AIM.
In practice, many of the projects we’ve worked
on have been in central and eastern European
countries, including Germany, the Czech
Republic, Ukraine and Bosnia. Interestingly,
though, one of our current projects is the fea-
sibility study for a gold project in Scotland. If
the project is developed, it would rank – as far
as I know – as Scotland’s first ever gold mine.”
He adds that Bara in the UK and in South
Africa – there is a common shareholding across
the two companies – are able to share resources
seamlessly. “With the South African company
having by far the bigger personnel complement,
it’s normally the case that they assist the UK
office rather than the other way around. This, in
fact, is one of our competitive advantages as the
use of South African consultants is extremely
economic for international clients in view of
the weakness of the rand.”
Prior to the formation of Bara, both Pooley
and Willis worked at South African mining
consultancy Royal HaskoningDHV (which
started life as Turgis Consulting), with Pooley
having been there for 13 years by the time he
left (he ran the operation as GM) and Willis for
10 years. Both are mining engineers and both
originally emigrated from the UK to South
Africa, Willis in the 1970s and Pooley in the
mid-90s. Willis worked continuously in South
Africa through to 2011, when he returned to
the UK. Apart from them, the other partners in
Bara are Clive Brown, Dick Watts and Maurice
Boustead.
The work carried out by Bara is exactly what
one would expect from a mining consultancy,
with its capabilities including studies, due dil-
igence reviews, CPRs, operational assistance,
mine design and layout, geotechnical engi-
neering, ventilation and cooling engineering,
mine services infrastructure engineering, and
(to a limited extent) process plant engineering.
Pooley stresses that Bara’s expertise cov-
ers both underground and open-pit mining,
with its current workload split fairly evenly
between the two.
The consultancy is expert in the use of indus-
try-standard software, notably Deswik.CAD