When the unthinkable happens: Boardroom lessons from the Sundance Resources tragedy

Emergency board

Blakiston and Canterbury began reaching out to former figures associated with Sundance, including ex-chair George Jones, investment banker Adam Rankine-Wilson, and Harris, known to Blakiston for her experience in the mining industry.

“We effectively administered the company in an operating sense, but we had no legal status,” explains Blakiston.

The company entered a trading halt, then suspension. And while the ASX would later reinstate it, this did not happen before an unusual legal structure had been declared into existence.

“The company couldn’t appoint any board members because there was nobody alive to appoint them,” Harris says.

That was the core problem. The Corporations Act assumes continuity. Sundance had none. So a workaround emerged.

Blakiston raised the issue with regulators and proposed a novel but legally sound structure – a group of professionals would step in as de facto directors – not formally appointed, but acting with authority under necessity and later subject to shareholder ratification.

“That was the first time I think that had ever been done,” he says.

By 2 July, a de facto board was operating. Sundance was back on the ASX in mid-July. A month later, on 16 August, an extraordinary general meeting was held to ratify both the appointments and every action taken in between. The company also had to grapple with something that was far more mundane, but no less legally sensitive – access to $80m in corporate funds sitting in a bank account with no authorised signatories.

“There was no director or secretary alive who was a signatory,” recalls Harris. “And there was no-one who could appoint one.”

Luckily, the bank took a pragmatic approach, allowing access, but under very strict conditions.

“The bank was fantastic at this point in time,” says Harris. “They allowed us to operate the bank account, so long as we got every transaction ratified at the EGM.”

Even basic corporate records became a legal headache. Harris recalls draft minutes from a May 2010 board meeting that couldn’t be signed because no director who had attended was still alive. Another set of potential minutes, from the June meeting in Africa, was lost in the wreckage.

Rather than simply seating a new board, the incoming directors had to rebuild the company’s governance foundations block by block, all while navigating intense legal constraints and the watchful eye of regulators.

But the task facing the new leadership was not limited to governance, it was also operational continuity. A quarterly ASX statement was due by the end of July, while an annual report followed in September.

“There were no directors of the company on 30 June,” says Harris. “So when you say, who are the directors in office? Well, there weren’t any.”

In parallel, Sundance had to rebuild itself structurally. A company secretary was appointed. A managing director was recruited. Additional board experience was brought in. The business, which had existed before as an operating entity with limited internal scaffolding, now had to develop systems under pressure.

In hindsight

Looking back, both Harris and Blakiston say the experience changed the way they’ve thought about risk on every board they’ved served on since.

“Don’t have everyone on the same piece of transport,” says Harris. But the principle, she explains, is nonetheless serious – avoid single points of catastrophic failure in leadership structures, or in any critical area.

“I don’t know how it’s appropriate to even try to plan for something like that [the Sundance tragedy],” she says. “It’s so remote and unlikely that I’m not sure there is anything really that people would generally want to plan for.”

Blakiston agrees.

Years later, Sundance would face further complications but the defining rupture remained the crash itself.

“One of the board members had only been appointed the month before,” says Harris. “It was just so tragic in so many different ways.”

The human cost

All 11 people aboard the aircraft were killed in the crash. The Australian Sundance casualties were chair Geoff Wedlock, CEO and managing director Don Lewis, directors Craig Oliver, John Jones and Ken Talbot (whose private investment company, the Talbot Group, was Sundance’s major shareholder) and company secretary John Carr-Gregg. Also killed were the two pilots, an American risk management adviser consulting to Sundance, a British investment analyst from GMP Securities and a French Talbot Group executive.

This article first appeared as 'The lost board' in the Aug/Sep 2026 Issue of Company Director Magazine.