Called Square Resources, the fund is the brainchild of Staffan Ever and will focus on the smaller end of the resources market.

It launched in October and will look at a range of projects, predominantly in coal and mostly in Australia.

Ever told International Longwall News that while the better-known resources funds worked in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Square would look at the hundreds of thousands to $2 million mark.

“Having said that, we have a heads of agreement here that when the project goes through the stages we could be looking at [putting in] $50 million,” he said.

Besides Moss, other advisory board members include Moss Capital chief executive officer Glen Willis, former Nomura and Lehman Australia executive Bjorn Zikarsky and former Whitehaven chief Keith Ross.

The coal focus comes from Ever’s background. He started out with AMCI in Australia, worked with Ken Talbot to get the Coppabella mine up and headed Q Coal, which started the Sonoma mine.

The fund already has made an investment.

“We took a small position in a public company,” Ever explained. “It’s not where we would normally go but I liked the way it was heading.”

The company is Lodestone and Square put $1.95 million in to buy 10 million shares. It has both coal and coal seam gas.

“We have the right to take another 5 million shares,” Ever said. “We have to take a board decision on that by the end of January.”

Square is drawing its funds from what Ever calls the Moss network, basically high-wealth individuals with mining backgrounds.

“We have enough cash in the till to do five to six transactions,” he said. “If you look at these things we’re normally nine to 18 months ahead by the time we need to raise the next tranche of funds.

“The money doesn’t go that quickly.”

Ever said the company would also be working to get end users to take capital positions in the resources players it is backing.

That is partly due to Ross’s background.

“Given Kevin started out on the buyer’s side, we are definitely going to try and work as much as possible with strategic partners rather than be adversarial,” Ever said.

“We want to get them involved in the projects we’re backing early on.”

While this may mean taking a bit of a haircut on the sale price, it will bring in capital and also help set up sales contracts when the project gets into production.