About Newfield

Board & Management

newfieldresources team photo

Mr. Karl Smithson

Executive Director

With over 30 years experience in the resources sector in Africa, Karl has held senior management positions at De Beers, SouthernEra Resources, Mano River Resources, and Stellar Diamonds. Karl possesses an in-depth knowledge of the exploration, evaluation, and production of diamond and other mineral resources. Throughout Karl’s career, he has established strong government and local stakeholder relationships in numerous African countries and has successfully secured a number of joint venture agreements with both major and junior resource companies.

Karl holds a Bachelor of Science in Geology (Honours) from Kingston University, London, and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Cape Town.

Mr. Jack Spencer-Cotton

Non-Executive Director

Jack has over 28 years of experience in the field of engineering. He has held a range of senior engineering roles in international manufacturing companies, as well as established his own business in engineering and consulting. He has previously held senior engineering roles at ERG Group, Sanmina-SCI Corporation, Startronics, SRX Global, and Pfizer Perth. He is presently a project manager at One New Energy and a non-executive director of an ASX-listed company.

Kunal Malhotra

Non-Executive Director

Kunal is an experienced company director and is currently a director and/or company secretary for a number of listed and non-listed public entities. He is also a Fellow of the Governance Institute of Australia and holds a Bachelor of Law and Commerce from the University of Western Australia. He has over 15 years’ experience spanning across corporate and commercial law and litigation. He has advised numerous listed and private clients on acquisitions, corporate and regulatory compliance, governance and commercial transactions.

Lili Jiang

Chief Financial Officer

Lili is a Chartered Accountant with over 15 years corporate and financial management experience in the resource sector. She also holds a Masters in Professional Accounting from Curtin University, Western Australia. Prior to joining Newfield, Ms Jiang was a senior associate of a consulting firm which has a focus on providing corporate services to listed companies.

Charl Barnard

General Manager Tongo Mine

Charl is a highly experienced business leader and manager with a consistent track record of successful project delivery over 25 years in eastern Europe, Central Asia, West, East and Southern Africa.

In the past 15 years, Charl has held senior roles as part of the group executive committee for Petra Diamonds and has served as in-Country and General Manager on both large and small open cast and underground diamond mines in Sierra Leone, Tanzania and South Africa. In particular, Charl has a strong track record of transitioning operations from the capital investment stage to cash generative and production focused stages.

Charl has also served roles as Group Head of Health, Safety and Environment with a strong focus on ESG management and reporting, and with a proven record of risk management successfully improving safety statistics on every operation he has managed.

Koos Visser

Senior Technical Advisor

Mr Visser is an electrical engineer with significant mine operational experience in a range of commodities, particularly diamonds, with over 13 years as Group Operations Manager for Petra Diamonds where he successfully led the transformation of a number of diamond mines including Cullinan, Finsch, Koffiefontein, Kimberley and Williamson and driving Petra Diamonds’ production to over 4 million carats per year. He also led the team that built the new R2 billion Cullinan Diamond Mine Processing Plant.

Mr Visser is currently Group Engineering Manager for a large platinum company operating in South Africa. He is also the principal of consulting group ATRQ which has been providing consulting services to the Tongo Diamond Mine. He has regularly visited and worked on the Tongo Diamond Mine over the past three years and recently designed the planned 50tph plant that will be constructed to meet future production levels at Tongo.