John Steele is the Chairman of Geotai Exploration and Mining Limited. The Toronto native is a geophysicist by training; meaning he measures the physical properties of rocks for mineral, oil and gas exploration.

He originally became interested in the field while studying math, physics and chemistry at the University of Toronto. In his program of study, there were seven different streams he could choose to go into, and starting in his second year he saw a little bit of each as he gravitated toward what he wanted to major in. One of his professors, a fellow by the name of Tuzo Wilson (an eminent geophysicist who put forth the Continental Drift theory and later became the President of Erindale College) used to show pictures of all the places he had visited during his career. He’d been everywhere. John was hooked: he wanted to be a physicist and he liked the idea of traveling and working outside.    

After obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in geophysics from the U of T, he then took a Masters Degree in the same field from the University of British Columbia. After graduating in 1973, he went to work for the mineral arm of a French oil company based in Calgary, called Aquitane. During the next ten years, he also worked for Chevron Minerals and two geophysical contractors: Geoterrex out of Ottawa and Scintrex out of Toronto.
 
Describing his work, John says, “It’s an in-depth professional job but it’s blue collar as well because you have to go into the jungles, bushes and mountains take measurements and do the field work. A lot of people start there and evolve into office work. But I still prefer to do both.”

But gradually John did evolve from just being a guy in the field to upper management and beginning in 1973 he started working overseas in and today he has worked in over eighty countries.     

“Canadian geophysical contractors were the first group of technical people that Canada exported in a serious way. Partly because you went where the mines were; you can’t bring them to you,” John says. He actually ended up studying a field still in its infancy: using geophysical techniques to define geology as opposed to looking for mineral deposits.

In the early 1980s, the Thai government wanted to do a mineral inventory to see what hidden treasures it had. Back then, the country’s main exports earners were tapioca and rice and the government wanted to add minerals to the list. So it borrowed US$50 million from the Asian Development Bank (at 11 ¼% interest), of which about seventy percent was targeted for geophysics. 

The ADB stipulated that the Thais needed experts to help implement the US$35 million geophysical side of the loan. That’s where John came in as he arrived to work inside the 127-year-old Thai Department of Mineral Resources, which is part of the Ministry of Industry. This was, and still is, the biggest survey of its kind ever performed and unfortunately the least utilized. (The results hang on the John’s office walls). The project was supposed to take five years, but the survey and all the ancillary work actually ended up stretching to eight from 1984-92. (John worked on it from 1984-87.).

Geothai (the original name of John’s company) grew out of this project. John realized that the mineral resources in Thailand were largely  unexploited and absolutely so by foreign groups, who had the knowledge and expertise that didn’t exist here. So he thought there was a role for a company that could do the work and also manage projects for foreign groups and bring them into the country. John then set up Geothai in1989 with his Thai partner at the DMR, Amnuaychai Thienprasert. They needed to build the business but John was in no financial state to stay here, so he moved his first wife and two children back to Canada, while Amnuaychai stayed here and ran Geothai. John generally managed to average one week a month or more in Thailand.

From 87-91, John then took a consulting job in Iran, which took him go to the Persian Gulf for two weeks every two months. He was the first technical guy in Iran after the revolution and the only foreign technical expert in the country. He was there the day the Ayatollah died and when the mullahs decreed that nine people in his workplace had to be shot for corruption. They forced all 4,000 staff outside  and proceeded to shoot the culprits in the back of the head while John and the rest of his co-workers were forced to stand by and watch.

Until 1994, he continued doing consulting work throughout the world, but he made a continuous series of trips to Thailand to oversee Geothai. The company then started putting together some exploration projects with foreign companies, helping them to better understand the way things were done here.

Then a Canadian stock brokerage house named Yorkton Securities, who specialized in mining finance, wanted to expand into Asia and bring companies here that needed financing. His company, Yorkton Securities, hired John to set up a Southeast Asian office with Bangkok as it hub and Geothai being its rep office. So for five years, Geothai worked with Yorkton to find and finance projects for Canadian public companies that wanted to work in this part of the world.  It also looked for local companies that wanted to raise financing for their activities such as the Malaysian Mining Corporation. This lead to financial projects in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and it generated exploration projects in Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam as well as some ancillary projects in Laos and Cambodia.

Misfortune and then tragedy struck in Christmas 2002, when John took his second wife, Kanok back to Canada. His partner  filed illegal papers, moved out of their office and took everything the company owned. John spent the next six months hiding out, because his former partner  sent men out to kill him when he returned to Thailand. He arranged to be met at the airport by five bodyguards, moved from vehicle to vehicle and he’d never spend more than two days in any one location. The story gets even more bizarre because Kanok, at one point talked down three gunmen sent to kill John – ON THEIR DOORSTEP.       

As the troubles continued, John and Kanok moved back to Toronto in the summer of 2003, where she set up a Thai massage parlour in the Bloor West Village. Very soon, it proved very successful, all the more remarkable because she speaks very little English.   

Over time, John took Amnuaychai took court, won the initial case, won on appeals too (by this time Amnuaychai had died in a car crash) and John ended up recovering US$30,000 out of $400,000 - Amnuaychai spent the rest. The irony was that Amnuaychai - who along with major wife and two children, had a number of minor wives and gave a house to every one of them - was John’s “best friend in life”. Amnuaychai introduced him to Kanok and John forgave him the instant he committed the betrayal, because he understood – it was just too much money to not be tempting. He could have taken most of Amnuaychai’s assets as means of getting back at him, but he didn’t.

In 2002, John formed a new company, Geotai, and carried all his business relationships to this company, and much of the work he had been doing with Geothai.
Today, the company provides technical assistance to the only two underground mines in the country, KEMCO Song Toh and Boh Yai in Kanchanaburi. These mines were run as a joint-venture between the German firm Metalgesellschaft and a fourth-generation Thai mining family, the Klipbuas, until 1993, when Metalgesellschaft left the mining business and the Klipbuas bought out Metalgesellschaft’s share. But they didn’t do much exploration  or looking for future reserves, they just focused on mining. In 1999, John proposed giving the Klipbuas a million dollars and spending three more million on exploration  but he couldn’t raise the capital then, so he continued on with diamond work and extraction work from tailings of a tin mine. 

But he kept in close contact with the Klipbuas and when Thani, the patriarch, died of a heart attack in 2005, John made a deal in 2006 to assist the son to get the mines operating again. With a group of partners he formed the Southeast Asia Mining Corporation (SEA) in Canada that same year to explore for new mineral deposits in Thailand  This company has raised $15 million so far, $5 million of which has gone to help Kemco refurbish the processing plant

Geotai has also taken 25 exploration licenses in Thailand: 4 around the Kanchanaburi mines (lead and zinc); 11 in Chantaburi (10 for molybdenum, 1 for antimony); one in Nakhon Sawan (for gold and copper), one in Lopburi (alos for gold and copper) and eight in Udon Thani (copper and gold again).    

Molybdenum, by the way, is a rare metal used to strengthen steel. When John was doing his initial survey of every known occurrence of every mineral in Thailand in the Department of Mineral Resources, he found no mention of molybdenum even though he knew the mineral existed in Thailand. I In the late 1800s, the French through their occupation of Cambodia, took two of Thailand’s southeastern provinces (Trat & Chantaburi) and BRGM, a French mining company operating in French Indochina, found molybdenum deposits  in Chantaburi and mined them for thirty years.  When these provinces reverted to Thailand in the 1930s, no record of this exploration was handed over to the Thai authorities. John, however, worked for a French company in the early 1970s and learned about the deposits that way.

The company plans to work throughout Southeast Asia with Thailand as its first objective and Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos its second with Indonesia the third.                                         

John employs Thai staff and contractors and won’t bring in foreign specialists unless absolutely necessary. He says Thai geologists and technical people are very competent though they may lack some economic experience due to the lack of mining in the country. One of the local companies he employs is GMT (who has 28 professionals on staff). GMT is doing the field work on the 4 molybdenum concessions Geotai has started working on in Chantaburi , and John’s geologists are overseeing their work. The Thai government has granted Geotai Board of Investment privileges for this work.  

Under GMT’s urging, Geotai has also opened a company in Phnom Penh in conjunction with GMT, who holds a 20% share and they are deep in throes of acquiring four concessions (two molybdenum and two gold) in Cambodia. In Laos, the company is working on securing copper and gold concessions, which are taking some time to obtain.
 
The Vietnamese concessions came about when Rob Jennings of Jennings Capital (whose company raised the seed money for the Southeast Asia Mining Corp) and Canadian Senator Marc Harb visited Vietnam in April 2007 looking at oil and gas and mining projects. They promised to bring in a Canadian company to Vietnam to work and Southeast Asia Mining seemed the logical choice, especially since John had worked in Vietnam for 18 years (and Kanok speaks Vietnamese hailing from Nakhom Phanom, where Ho Chi Minh himself spent 8 years in exile), and she has Vietnamese ancestry.  

SenatorHarb recommended they use the services of the former Vietnamese Ambassador to Canada, Madame Hoi, who worked directly for Ho Chi Minh. The company has begun work on four projects in four different provinces including seven lead and zinc mines in northern Vietnam, one titanium and three epithermal gold projects in central Vietnam and a regional exploration program just south of Hanoi.       

The latter project is particularly interesting because the Vietnamese government usually restricts access to large-scale exploration, but Madame’s Hoi’s influence has given Southeast Mining unprecedented access SEA’s strengths are the financing it brings, its technical ability and its marketing power
 
At 65, John still leads an active work life. “One does not retire” is his motto. He has purposely kept a low profile in the ex-pat community preferring to integrate himself with the Thais he is working and dealing with. As a result, not many people in the Canadian community in Thailand know John Steele and that’s a shame. He’s been a credit to his company and his country and his expertise has helped Thailand evolve as a country. He’s a good example of what Canadian know-how can do when it’s properly applied. 

Contact Info:
Tel. 02-274-7511
Website: www.seamining.com
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