The Aussie Who Sat Across From Trump
He ran a Prime Minister's office and stood in the Oval Office. Now he's advising an ASX small-cap with ground in Nevada
There’s an official White House photo of Arthur Sinodinos standing in the Oval Office, side by side with Donald Trump.
He looks like he belongs there, because for three years he did.
From 2020 to 2023 he was Australia’s ambassador to Washington, the man Canberra sent to negotiate with the Americans. Before that he ran John Howard’s office and sat in Cabinet, and for years people had him pencilled in as a future Treasurer.
This week he signed on as strategic advisor to Evion Group (ASX: EVG), a critical minerals play trading at 4.9 cents with ground in Nevada.
Men with that record don’t usually surface around ASX small-caps. For a company Evion’s size, it’s a name with a reach most juniors never get near.
One of the US groups Sinodinos advises, Cove Capital, owns the very tungsten project Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump just backed. He moves through Washington’s critical minerals world at a level a junior explorer almost never reaches, and Evion has just brought him into its corner.
A good deposit still counts for everything in this game, but what’s changed is that critical minerals now sit in the middle of a geopolitical fight that keeps getting messier.
Washington, Canberra and their allies are tipping billions into supply chains tied to defence, semiconductors and energy security, all of it aimed at cutting their reliance on China.
The governments running those programs decide who gets the funding and the contracts.
Getting a small company in front of them is the hard part, and it’s the part Sinodinos has spent 30 years developing.
From Howard's Office to Trump's Washington
Before Washington, Sinodinos had already spent two decades close to power.
He ran John Howard’s office, then moved into the Senate and into Cabinet, picking up Assistant Treasurer, Cabinet Secretary, and Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science.
That last job put him in charge of the government’s industry and resources policy, the same brief now driving the critical minerals push.
Then came Washington.
His three years there lined up with the moment the West stopped taking its supply chains for granted. AUKUS was signed on his watch and defence ties tightened.
Around the same time, critical minerals went from a quiet corner of the mining world to a national security problem, largely because so much of the supply ran through China.
The relationships he built over those years reach into the US government and the investment houses now circling the minerals trade. Cove Capital is one of them.
“Governments are placing greater focus on securing resilient, Western-aligned supply chains for strategically important industrial minerals, reflected in initiatives such as the recently announced Quad Critical Minerals Initiative Framework between the United States, Japan, Australia and India.”
- The Hon Arthur Sinodinos AO
The Trump Sons' Tungsten Play
The appointment gets more interesting once you look at where else Sinodinos is spending his time.
He’s also a strategic advisor to Cove Capital, a US-based critical minerals investment group that backs projects tied to American supply chain and resource security.
Cove has been busy across North America, building a book of investments aimed at domestic manufacturing and strategic supply.
Its highest-profile play is Kaz Resources, a Kazakhstan tungsten venture carrying the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource on the planet, with up to US$1.6 billion in US government financing lined up behind it.
Tungsten goes into drilling tools, armour-piercing rounds and kinetic missiles, and China controls about 80% of the world's supply. After Beijing tightened its export rules early last year, the price ran from roughly US$350 a tonne to around US$3,100. The West wants its own.
The project made headlines when Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump turned up as investors, through Nasdaq-listed company Skyline Builders, which merged with Cove’s tungsten unit.
The combined entity, Kaz Resources, is set to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker KAZR.
Cove’s man on the government relations and partnerships behind deals like Kaz, across North America and Central Asia, is Sinodinos.
That’s the same skill set EVG now has.
No Better Place Than Nevada
The appointment lands right after EVG’s acquisition of the CARP Fluorspar Project in Nevada, which drops the company into what plenty of people still rate as the best mining jurisdiction going.
Nevada has the infrastructure and the permitting to get mines built, and a long history of building them.
Getting a mine built is the catch in the whole critical minerals push. Governments want domestic supply, but supply has to start with projects that can get permitted and developed somewhere stable. Nevada fits.
CARP gives EVG exposure to fluorspar, which gets a fraction of the airtime lithium and copper get, while quietly doing a lot of heavy industrial lifting.
It goes into hydrofluoric acid, semiconductors, uranium processing, aerospace and defence supply chains, and the US and several allies list it as a critical mineral.
China sits at the centre of fluorspar supply, the same way it does with graphite, and the West is scrambling to build its own sources. That’s the gap a Nevada project is aimed squarely at.
Three Legs, Three Continents
Nevada grabbed the headlines, but fluorspar is the newcomer in EVG's story. The company started life chasing graphite, and that side is an important piece.
Its flagship there is the Maniry Graphite Project in Madagascar, which the European Union has tagged as a strategic project under its Critical Raw Materials Act.
In plain terms, Brussels has formally backed it as part of Europe's plan to build a battery supply chain that doesn't run through China.
Then there’s India, where EVG holds a 50% stake in Panthera Graphite Technologies, a processing plant already selling expandable graphite into the US and Europe.
So EVG has graphite coming out of the ground in Madagascar, a plant turning it into product in India, and fluorspar in Nevada, with no Chinese partners anywhere in the chain.
“Fluorspar and graphite are both critical minerals underpinning semiconductor, nuclear, battery and advanced industrial applications. Evion’s combination of US fluorspar through the CARP Project in Nevada and established graphite mining and downstream processing across Madagascar, India and Europe gives the company a genuinely integrated position across allied jurisdictions, and I look forward to supporting its broader North American and international growth strategy.”
- The Hon Arthur Sinodinos AO
Last week the US, Japan, Australia and India launched the Quad Critical Minerals Initiative Framework, a plan to mobilise up to US$20 billion across mining, processing and recycling.
The point of it is getting critical minerals supply out of Chinese hands.
Line EVG up against that framework and it covers the US through fluorspar, India through graphite processing, and Australia through the listing itself.
What the Appointment Actually Delivers
For most small-caps it comes down to the rock in the ground and whether management can turn it into a mine. That hasn't changed for Evion.
Everything around it has. As governments wade deeper into critical minerals, getting in front of the right people in Washington has become its own kind of asset.
The officials writing the policy and running the funding programs are hard to reach, and Sinodinos has spent a long career working with them.
He gives Evion a way in. Three decades at the top of government and diplomacy, and a live network across the US groups chasing critical minerals supply right now.
Where to From Here
That reach is the part a junior usually can’t buy, and Evion now has it sitting across three of the four Quad nations.
The doors Sinodinos can open, US funding programs and the offtake talks that follow, are the ones Evion has to walk through to turn a handful of critical minerals assets into something bigger.
There’s hard yards between here and there. CARP is freshly acquired and the real graft is still ahead, and a company this size chasing American money will need more of its own to get there.
That's the bet with any early mover. Few get to make it with a man who's stood in the Oval Office beside the President.
Go back to that photograph. A former ambassador, shoulder to shoulder with the President, in the room where the decisions get made. He has now put his name beside fluorspar in Nevada, graphite in Madagascar and a plant in India.
Whether the rock and the relationships add up to something, nobody knows yet.
But Arthur Sinodinos has looked at a four-cent stock and decided it is worth his time, and men like him do not spend it cheaply.