An Australian billionaire has emerged as the half-owner of MinRes Air (Perth International), a fly-in-fly-out start-up shuttling employees between capital cities and sites owned by mining giant Mineral Resources. The company's most recent annual report reveals Mineral Resources has 50% stakes in four MinRes Air entities, with the other 50% ultimately held by a newly registered business called AvWest FIFO Pty Ltd. As first reported by the Australian Financial Review (AFR), that entity is controlled by Tim Roberts, whose father founded the Multiplex construction company, since sold to Brookfield Asset Management.

Notes to the 2024 Full Year Financial Results released on August 29 show Mineral Resources has half stakes in MinRes Air Aircraft Pty Ltd, MinRes Air Facilities Pty Ltd, MinRes Air Flight Operations Pty Ltd, and MinRes Air Holdings Pty Ltd.

Australian corporate records show that the first three of these are wholly owned by MinRes Air Holdings Pty Ltd. Fifty of the 100 shares issued by that company are owned by MinResources Mining Services Pty Ltd, a wholly-owned Mineral Resources subsidiary. The remaining 50 are owned by AvWest, with Roberts holding all the shares issued by that company.

The AFR's most recent rich list, published in May 2024, puts Roberts' fortune at AUD1.87 billion Australian dollars (USD1.25 billion). He benefited from the sale of his family's 26% stake in Multiplex in 2007 to Brookfield but has since built on that by developing the successful AvWest aviation services business in Perth. However, AvWest FIFO Pty Ltd is not part of the AvWest corporate structure; instead, it is entirely owned by Roberts.

Roberts is also a former Mineral Resources director and friend of that company's founder and CEO, Chris Ellison. Mineral Resources has extensive operations in lithium, iron ore, energy, and mining services across Western Australia. Its CEO is one of two directors on the four MinRes Air entities, the other being Mark Wilson, Mineral Resources' chief financial officer and company secretary.

Ellison is promoting his new internal company airline as a cost-effective alternative to relying on commercial fly-in-fly-out operators. To date, MinRes Air has utilised an A319-100 wet leased from Skytraders (SND, Sydney Kingsford Smith). It has also recently dry leased an A320-200 from Zephyrus Aviation Capital. That aircraft is now entered into the Australian register as VH-8FE (msn 5129) and has ferried into Perth. MinRes Air still needs to secure its own air operator's certificate but expects to do so in 2025.

Ellison told analysts last week that the cost of fitting in with commercial operators and tinkering with shifts at his mining sites was costing the company tens of millions of dollars annually. "What can we do about it? The answer is we bring it in-house," he said. "We're running under a licence from a company based in Melbourne until we get our own, which we should have around the middle of next year. But we've started running from the east coast, hauling people out of Brisbane International. Instead of a day and a half each way to get people from the east coast back [to the mines] it's now five and a half hours direct into our sites."

"So [we are now] into Wodgina and direct into Ken's Bore. We are shortly going to be coming into Kambalda, and then I’m hoping within the next four weeks the airline will be in full blast, and we’ll be doing all of our FIFO flying coming out of Perth. Its tens of millions of dollars of savings, and the cost of doing it - in the first year, it’s about cost neutral with what we were going to spend with the airlines."