O'Keeffe ran Glencore Australia, building it into one of the biggest divisions in the biggest commodity trader in the world, alongside Glencore's chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg. “Ivan did all the coal,” O'Keeffe says. Michael's “a good guy”, Glasenberg says.
     But O'Keeffe left Glencore. He founded his own coal group in South Africa and Mozambique, Riversdale Mining, which he sold at the top of the market in 2011, turning a 20 cent stock into a $3.9bn payday.
     O'Keeffe has spent the last few years largely out of view. As metal prices tumbled, he shipped his family to Montreal two years ago, quietly using the downturn to hoover up iron ore assets

in Quebec. In total, his company, Champion Iron, has bought over five billion tonnes of iron ore in the ground, including the Bloom Lake mine, a sprawling complex of pits, plants and railway loops, linked by conveyer belts and covered in snow.
     Bloom Lake changed hands for $4.9bn five years ago, when iron ore was trading at $190 per tonne. O'Keeffe was less generous, buying the mine after it entered administration last year, paying C$10.5m ($8m). Increasingly, it looks like the deal of the downturn.
     When Champion signed the agreement, iron ore had fallen for four consecutive years, tumbling into the thirty dollar per tonne range for

the first time in a decade. It has risen ever since, more than doubling in twelve months, pushing through $80 per tonne at ports in China last week. O'Keeffe's acquisition caught the very week of the low.

     Outside, a cloud has parked itself over Montreal, blocking the view and closing the airport. A truly cold wind hints at the winter ahead. Mining engineers are strolling around in Champion's office, chatting into their mobiles in French about dam design and metal flow sheets. “Champion-bonjour,” O'Keeffe's secretary says into the telephone, every few minutes.
     Up at Bloom Lake, where temperatures...plunge to minus fifty, billions of dollars of equipment is lined-up, waiting for Champion's board to push the button on a mining restart.
     As iron ore has rallied, O'Keeffe's deal looks almost absurd, like buying a tower block for the price of a stapler. The price was “very, very surprising,” one Canadian politician told reporters at the time. But O'Keeffe's team argued (successfully), when they bought the mine, that it should be priced as a liability.
     Iron ore was crashing through successive lows and companies were either buckling, or upping production, to drive down unit costs. Prices had fallen 80 per cent. Rio Tinto was on the brink of curtailing production at its IOC mine in Labrador, according to a leaked memo, whilst the nearby Wabush mine was shuttered and its assets stripped. Bloom Lake's hanger-like buildings, which have never turned a profit, looked like a mining tombstone.
     Confidence was so low that few even noticed the Bloom Lake deal go through. Quebec's government stepped in to support the transaction, like a lender of last resort, buying the mine's railway link and port, plus shares in Champion Iron.
     Analysts who spotted the agreement only noted that government intervention would deepen the downturn. Quebec's decision “is likely to prolong” a “multi-year long depression” for iron ore, one bank in London told clients. “Prices are sending a powerful message: iron ore capacity has to permanently close.”
     A year later and iron ore has turned on a dime. Mining giant Vale announced last month that as it cranks-up a vast new mine in Brazil, it will either close or pull-back production from its higher cost operations. Rio Tinto's new chief executive, Jean-Sebastien Jacques, has also swung the group's strategy around, saying he is willing to take tonnage out of the market, curtailing production, if prices falter.

 “Shipments are slowing down,” says Bernstein analyst Paul Gait, who monitors weekly iron ore volumes by satellite. “The mantra of value over volume is gaining momentum,” according to Investec.
     Higher prices will quickly feed through into higher profits for the world's largest iron ore miners and the industry will learn to stop chasing meaningless production records, O'Keeffe argues. “The lower value tonnes are not being mined, so production is pretty flat, but the bang for your buck's better.”

     As prices recover, it has become all too apparent how few companies capitalised on the downturn, by buying-up mines at the bottom of the market.
     Metal prices fell for five years, but outside of gold, Champion is one of only a handful of companies to have scooped-up assets out of all proportion to everything else in its portfolio: Lundin Mining bought the Candelaria copper mine in Chile, coal miner Westmoreland mopped up coal mines across the US, whilst Labrador-based Altius Minerals snapped-up more than a dozen royalties in copper, potash and coal.
     In each case, the companies are run by single-minded company founders, who look at their own map, pushing through deals, against the overwhelming weight of the market consensus. “When you have nine people out of ten saying you've totally got it wrong, sometimes you question your own sanity,” O'Keeffe says. “But we backed it by putting our own money in.”
      A small number of private equity investors have also piled in and Champion's shares have rocketed, tripling in twelve months. O'Keeffe bought the bulk of his own shares last year, at prices as low as 11 cents. Champion is now trading at 48 cents. “Fair play to him,” one banker new to the story says.
      “There's an element of Humpty Dumpty to it as well,” O'Keeffe says, “because we were still sitting on the wall, when everyone else was crashing around us.”

     One brokerage that did notice the Bloom Lake deal go through was Pareto Securities in London, which put out a one-liner, when the agreement was announced. “This truly looks like a counter-cyclical investment,” Pareto said.
     Rhys Bradley, a former analyst at Pareto, who is now a finance director, spotted the deal because of O'Keeffe, a fellow Aussie. “Out of everyone in the mining industry, I think he is the most strategic,” Bradley says.
     “The natural human heuristic is to take two data points, draw a straight line and keep on going, so when prices go down people assume they'll keep on going down forever,” says Noel Dunn, the former head of mining investment at insurance group Liberty Mutual, which has previously sunk capital into Canadian iron ore. “Every time prices go down some bright spark in an investment bank writes a research piece saying, they'll be giving iron ore away, nobody will want to take it.”
     Dunn has maintained throughout the downturn that Canadian iron ore is viable. “If you're a stock investor and you have a three-month time horizon, then it's probably not a great idea. But if you're Michael O'Keeffe, he's really saying to you, valuations are very low, it's a pretty good time to roll all of these things into a box.”
     “Iron ore, whether it's worth $50 or $100, isn't very valuable per tonne, so it's really a logistics business. You dig it up, stick it through a crusher and stick it on a train. If you're 1,000km up the jungle in Africa with no railway line, but you have the world's greatest iron ore deposit, that is not worth very much. If your iron ore is right next to a railway line, if it's already built, and you can buy it cheap enough, for sure, that's a great investment.”
      Another analyst who noticed the Bloom Lake deal was Garrett Nelson at BB&T, a US-based bank. “This buyer got a tremendous deal,” Nelson said at the time. “Iron ore prices won't be at these depressed levels forever. Given the quality of the ore at that mine, we think that asset will have value... they probably bought it for less than liquidation value.”
     Liquidation is not an option for O'Keeffe. Instead, he wants to learn how to operate the mine's crusher, he says, so he can wallop the first rock, when Bloom Lake is switched back on. Premiums for Canadian iron ore are meanwhile sitting at $10 to $12 per tonne, meaning Bloom Lake's tonnage would fetch over $90 per tonne, if it hit the market tomorrow.
     Analysts and bankers who remember Bloom Lake's steep quarterly losses and multi-billion dollar write-downs remain doubtful about O'Keeffe's plans to turn the operation around. Cash costs at Bloom Lake were as high as $92 per tonne in 2014, pushing the mine and its former owner deep into the red.
     But O'Keeffe refuses to budge from the idea that by dropping the mine's expansion plans and rejigging production, Bloom Lake can make money at fifty dollars per tonne. At that level, he thinks the company can compete with any other tonnage, at any point in the cycle.
     With prices rising, O'Keeffe also believes the opportunity for buying-up mines for cents on the dollar has passed. Asset sales by Glencore, Anglo American and Vale have all been pulled in recent weeks, or are going through at pricey levels. If the window has shut, is O'Keeffe happy with what Champion bought? “Don't ask stupid questions. Very happy.”
     “Heat wave,” he adds, leaving the office. “It's nine degrees.”