Businesspants.com, which advertised undergarments for ‘businessmen who aspire to being comfortable while travelling and during meetings and conferences and who know intuitively exactly what they want’, he is now heading a company with grand designs to open a chain of Jules Verne-esque underwater hotels around the globe. So far, these wondrous structures are still in those design stages, with proposed sites in Qingdao, China, and the Middle East yet to find sufficient funding.

Crescent Hydropolis lost £1.2 million in the six months to June and the shares have lost 90 per cent of their AIM float value. Recently, there was a dispute over half of a £315,000 funding arranged through broker Nabarro Wells (now part of
Ambrian Capital).

A golden farewell
Controversial Canadian mining billionaire Robert Friedland made a £100 million profit little more than a month ago, when his Ivanhoe company sold a key stake in China-focused Jinshan Gold Mines to state-owned China National Gold Corporation for about £110 million. That is the scale of return to which Friedland, whose Diamond Fields concern played a key role in capitalising on the massive Voysey’s Bay nickel discovery in the 1990s, is accustomed.

Now Jay Chmelauskas, president of Toronto-quoted Jinshan, is busy spreading the word among investors in London and elsewhere that Friedland – who was once known as ‘toxic Bob’ over pollution from a much earlier venture and later played a key role in the less than sensational Bakyrchik Russian gold play – has left something in Jinshan for the buyers. Chmelauskas declares the company has ‘a mandate to be a leading global gold producer’.

Jinshan is moving into production at Chang Shan Hao in northern China, where it hopes to increase a five million-oz estimated gold resource and lift annual output from 120,000 oz to 180,000 oz. The company also wants to add to an established 778,000-oz gold resource at Dadiangou, develop other prospects in north-west China and pursue new merger and exploration avenues.

One avenue Chmelauskas says he will not be exploring is an AIM quote.