A Nasty Corporate Divorce, With Insults Traded on Twitter

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Like divorces by couples, corporate separations are rarely pretty.

But the split between Bumi, a London-listed Indonesian coal company, and its co-founders is turning out to be a particularly nasty and public one, culminating on Wednesday with a tirade of schoolboy insults hurled across Twitter between the scion of one of Britain's financial dynasties and a member of one of Indonesia's most powerful conglomerates.

Here's what Nathaniel Rothschild, the 42-year-old financier, former playboy and a major stakeholder in Bumi (renamed Asia Resource Minerals in December) had to say on Twitter to his outgoing partner, Aga Bakrie, of the powerful Bakrie family in Indonesia: 'I look forward to watching Bumi Tbk trading to zero.'

Then more:

Mr. Bakrie's response left no doubt that the feelings were mutual:

Mr. Rothschild then inquired, not-so-gently, into Mr. Bakrie's other business interests:

and then:

It only got better from there. Some back and forth was exchanged about the Indonesian investment climate. And then some playground insults over who was less intelligent.

First, Mr. Rothschild to Mr. Bakrie:

Mr. Bakrie's retort:

Mr. Rothschild, in an interview, was more circumspect than he was on Twitter, where he has been posting for all of two weeks.

He said he was listening to a lecture on health economics at King's College when he saw Mr. Bakrie tweet about their failed business relationship and felt the need to respond.

'This is a case of old-fashioned fraud by a U.K. public company director, and we will continue to highlight it until the person is held accountable or the money returned,' Mr. Rothschild said.

Behind the barbs is a business implosion with allegations of fraud, mismanagement and incompetence.

Mr. Rothschild, the Oxford-educated, reformed playboy (he reportedly now goes to bed at 9:30 every night), formed a shell company in 2010 called Vallar. He raised £707 million ($1.17 billion) to buy mining assets. Through a JPMorgan Chase banker, he teamed up with the Bakrie family, one of Indonesia's most powerful families.

Vallar bought 75 percent of Berau Coal and 25 percent of the Bumi Resources Group, both mining assets, for $3 billion in a deal composed of a combination of cash and new Bumi shares in November 2010. In April 2011, the company became Bumi.

Mr. Rothschild put in about $120 million of his own money.

The deal allowed the Bakrie family to appoint the chairman, the chief executive and the finance director.

At the time, there appeared to be insatiable demand for coal-generated power coming from China. But coal prices then fell, and the situation got ugly. At one point, Mr. Rothschild wrote a letter to the board outlining his concerns about accounting irregularities and leaked it to The Financial Times and Bloomberg. The share price plummeted.

'Nat is a very good friend of mine, but he does tend to go straight into the wall head down, hoping the wall will break,' Simon Murray, chairman of the commodities giant Glencore International, told Bloomberg.

People close to Mr. Rothschild, who is the youngest of four children of Jacob, the fourth Baron Rothschild, said he felt strongly that the fraud should be exposed and that the board was doing little to stop it.

Eventually, the Bakries left the board, and new management was brought in.

Mr. Rothschild tried to have that new management removed as well. His efforts failed.

Shares in the company have lost more than 75 percent since the company went public in 2010. At the time, it was one of London's most successful initial public offerings, and Mr. Rothschild followed it with another blank-check I.P.O. with nearly $2 billion to invest in oil assets.

On Tuesday, Asia Resource Minerals announced a $500 million deal in which the Bakrie family sold out of the London-listed company and used the proceeds to buy back its share of the Indonesian business, Bumi Resources.

The sale prompted the Twitter exchange, making Mr. Rothschild, already a fairly well-known asset in financial circles, famous among a small set on Twitter.

The upside in the big mess of Bumi and the Bakries is that Mr. Rothschild is nearing 2,000 followers on Twitter. There's no word on what his family had to say about his tweeting.