AngloGold Ashanti has appointed Paul Graves an independent non executive director, adding a finance and commodities operator to a board overseeing one of the world's largest gold producers. The company announced the appointment on 25 September 2026, with effect from the first of October.
Graves joins the Audit and Risk Committee and the Social, Ethics and Sustainability Committee, the two bodies that carry the heaviest load at a miner listed in New York, Johannesburg, Accra and Sydney and therefore answerable to four sets of disclosure expectations at once.
His career has moved between banking and the chemicals and battery materials industries rather than through gold. He spent twelve years at Goldman Sachs, rising to partner, before joining FMC Corporation as executive vice president and chief financial officer from 2012 to 2018. He then led the spin out of FMC's lithium business, serving as president and chief executive of Livent and, after its combination with Allkem, of Arcadium Lithium. When Rio Tinto acquired Arcadium in March 2025 he became chief executive of Rio Tinto Lithium. He is also a director of Charles River Laboratories, where he chairs the Strategic Planning and Capital Allocation Committee.
Jochen Tilk, who chairs the AngloGold Ashanti board, said the appointment brings what he described as a rare combination of international executive leadership and deep financial discipline.
The hire reads as a capital allocation appointment rather than a technical one. Gold producers are currently generating cash at a rate the sector has rarely seen, which turns the board's central question from how to survive a low price into how to spend a high one. A director who has run a commodity business through an acquisition cycle, and who sat in the chief financial officer's chair at a listed chemicals group, is a specific answer to that question.
It also continues a pattern across the mining majors of recruiting directors from adjacent industrial sectors rather than from within mining itself. The battery materials industry in particular has produced a cohort of executives who have managed extreme price volatility, rapid capacity expansion and consolidation inside a single decade, and that experience is increasingly being bought by boards elsewhere in resources.
Graves will stand for election by shareholders at the company's next annual general meeting in the ordinary way.
AngloGold Ashanti completed its move to a primary listing in New York in 2023 and has since restructured around a smaller set of producing assets, which raises rather than lowers the demands on an audit and risk committee. The company reports under United States accounting standards while operating mines in Africa, Australia and the Americas, each with its own permitting, tax and currency regime.
