Glencore’s succession isn’t over yet. Let’s see

Ivan Glasenberg, the pugnacious boss of commodities giant Glencore Plc, says he will retire next year. His influence will linger beyond that.
After years of brushing off succession questions with the reassurance that he wouldn’t outstay his welcome, Glasenberg slipped the word into a mundane investor presentation. He’ll be replaced by a lieutenant, Gary Nagle, who takes the helm as the company unpicks a string of geopolitical, judicial and climate knots. At least partly reassured by the news and dividend promises, investors responded by pushing the stock to its highest level since February.
Glasenberg does remain the second-largest shareholder, though. Completing the handover demands a refreshed board, too, with new faces to keep his ascendancy in check and to support the stated shift of this coal producer and oil trader to a greener outlook. That should begin with a new chairman to replace Tony Hayward, the former BP Plc chief executive, who has been on Glencore’s board since 2011. He’s already at the limits prescribed by the UK corporate governance code.
An outsize, often gruff, personality, Glasenberg has put his stamp on the trading house founded by buccaneering oil trader Marc Rich. First, by listing it — a step he compared to crossing the Rubicon — and then by merging with miner Xstrata. He shook up a mining industry run by engineers and bruised by bad deals, with talk of investing as an owner, not a custodian, and paying generous returns. Bankers would wake at dawn to run with him, hoping to court favor. His bluster remained unaltered even by near-death experiences, as when prices collapsed in 2015.
With the departures of Glasenberg and coal-trading boss Tor Peterson, probably the last of the original gang that turned billionaires in 2011, goes the era of swashbuckling mining and trading, when few restrictions stood between lucrative deals in some of the world’s least savory spots.
It’s less clear that this will really mean the end of an era at Glencore. Glasenberg’s exit hasn’t been the brutal Darwinian process he so often predicted. The man universally known as Ivan pushed himself into the seat of his own predecessor, Willy Strothotte, who himself had evicted Rich. Nagle, by contrast, has been carefully picked and has six months to learn the ropes. He shares much of his boss’s South African background, including alma mater, a start in accountancy and a career steeped in coal. It’s been enough to earn him the nickname “mini Ivan,” and raises the question of just how far new management will be able to veer from the current chief executive’s path.

—Bloomberg