Mo Munshi walked from Prison 421 in mid-summer to be greeted by howling winds and sleet prickling his face. The weather was grim for that time of year, even for Ulaanbaatar. It was June 2024, and he carried his meagre possessions – a tracksuit, a jacket, a pair of shorts and a few T-shirts – in a small plastic bag.
In a couple of large plastic bags, stuffed full, were his papers: deeds, money transfers, contracts, bank statements, copies of emails, legal letters. The many hundreds of pages of documents told the story of how the Australian geologist and businessman had come to Mongolia as a very wealthy man, seeking to build a mining business in the former Soviet outpost. They drew lines to those in power in Ulaanbaatar that, to him, clearly explained why he’d been arrested and thrown into a fetid Mongolian jail for seven years. They outlined how he’d been stripped of tens of millions of dollars worth of assets. They explained why he was walking out the gates of Prison 421 as a pauper.
He’d walk from one cell to another.
The 65-year-old was taken from jail that day to the immigration department, where officials asked to see his passport. “It was pointless because my passport had expired,” he tells AFR Weekend when we visit him in Ulaanbaatar. And it was pointless also because even a valid, up-to-date passport wouldn’t have helped. He was handed another document to add to his depressing pile of papers, a notice that he’d been placed on a travel ban and could not leave the country, even though he’d served his prison term.
That was 16 months ago, and he’s still stuck in Mongolia, living in a tiny one-bedroom flat, surviving on what little money his family can send from Perth. He’s severely ill with various serious ailments and needs urgent medical attention. And the Australian government appears powerless, or unwilling, to help.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert knows some of what he is experiencing, having spent 804 days in an Iranian jail. She believes the Australian government has washed its hands of Mo Munshi. “Once someone is out of prison, the Australian government kind of says, ‘All right – job done. We don’t need to concern ourselves with this travel ban,’ and it backs off.”
“Nothing gets done,” she adds. “And these people, like Mo, can be stuck there for years and not be allowed to return home to Australia, to your family, to your kids, your grandkids … it’s indefinite detention.”
His is a cautionary tale for Australian executives and workers plying their trades in far-flung, often unstable, regions of the world: get into trouble, and you’re on your own.
Billionaire miner Gina Rinehart is fond of saying that if Australia doesn’t pull up its socks and rid itself of red and green tape, the miners will simply take their bulldozers and drill rigs to another sandpit. “There are other countries that have iron ore and other minerals,” she thundered last year about delays to her $600 million McPhee project in the Pilbara. “Investments will continue to move offshore.”
Careful what you wish for.
The leviathan Anglo-Australian miner, Rio Tinto, has found that to tango with the Mongolian government is to dance with a bear. For almost two decades they have been squabbling, in and out of court, over the vast treasures being dug from the giant Gobi Desert copper and gold mine, Oyu Tolgoi.
It’s the single largest investment in Mongolian history and accounts for a quarter of the country’s GDP. It is also among the largest investment projects by an Australian company abroad. Rio owns 66 per cent of Oyu Tolgoi. The junior partner, the Mongolian government, holds 34 per cent of the shares, as well as all the aces.
In 2022, Rio wiped a $3.4 billion debt owed by the Mongolians for their share of the mine’s construction. It was an effort to “reset the relationship to allow the parties to move forward together”. It didn’t work.
The Mongolian government recently launched court proceedings in the UK, alleging Rio had bribed a former Mongolian politician, “transferring multi-millions of dollars” in the early stages of the project. It is demanding compensation. There have also been tax disputes, involving hundreds of millions of dollars, investor lawsuits and grave threats to the multibillion- dollar mine from political instability.
It’s been a nightmare for the dual ASX-London listed company, but, so far, none of its executives have ended up in jail. With tensions already heightened between the Mongolian government and the giant Australian miner, has this affected Australia’s willingness to push hard for Mo Munshi’s return?
“I wish I could say that Australian consular officials are not impacted by Australia’s economic interests,” says Munshi’s Australian lawyer, Alison Battisson. “But I’m not so sure … I am very concerned that the lack of any intervention could be to do with bigger economic concerns.”
Battisson says it would greatly help if Foreign Minister Penny Wong made a detour to Ulaanbaatar on one of her overseas trips. Wong’s office has written an official letter requesting the travel ban be lifted, but there has been no response.
Wong, Battisson says, could at least call in the Mongolian ambassador and give him a public dressing down. “I think the prime minister commenting on the fact that there’s an Australian businessman in Mongolia, who’s clearly had his assets stripped and has suffered gross human rights violations in prison, would be incredibly useful … I just don’t understand the timidity.”
“Unless something is done soon,” Battisson says, “he will die there. It’s as simple as that.”
Governor-General Sam Mostyn recently visited Mongolia to learn more about its “growing resources and energy sector where Australian companies are engaging and investing.”
AFR Weekend understands she did raise Munshi’s detention with Mongolian officials, but her office did not provide details of the discussions. Mostyn did, however, take a detour to Rio’s Oyu Tolgoi mine, to be greeted by the company’s senior executives, and was accompanied by Australia’s ambassador to Mongolia, Leo Zeng.
Mo Munshi moved offshore, “to engage and invest,” in the resources sector and ended up in solitary confinement. He’s now living alone in Ulaanbaatar, not knowing when he’ll see his kids, and the grandkids he’s not yet cuddled.
Welcome to the Hotel Mongolia, where you can check out, but leaving is another thing.
“I did the full time for a crime I didn’t commit.”
— Mo Munshi spent seven years in Prison 421 in Ulaanbaatar
The years in jail have left Munshi a broken shell. He has a litany of serious ailments – blocked arteries, chronic back, hip and leg pain, kidney failure, an enlarged prostate, which is possibly cancerous, and urinary tract infections. All were exacerbated by the squalid conditions in jail and repeated bashings from prison guards. The food was atrocious, mainly boiled tripe, and there were no fresh vegetables. A Muslim, he was forced to eat pork or starve. In winter, the cells were freezing, and in summer, it was a hothouse.
He cannot get treatment in Mongolia for his acute illnesses, and he now survives in his flat with a heater, an old TV, a laptop and his papers. He doesn’t speak Mongolian, and is cut off from the world outside. His family is extremely concerned about his mental well-being. “I get up in the morning, wash, have breakfast, read books, get on the internet and read articles,” he tells AFR Weekend. “I talk to my family when I can, but they’re all working. The days are very long and boring.”
He only ever leaves to stock up on food from a nearby market, fearful that if he’s out too long or wanders too far, “I’ll be threatened with intimidation and possibly things beyond that.”
“I just want to go back to Australia,” he says. “I did the full time for a crime I didn’t commit. I hate it here. I need proper medical care quite urgently. I just want to go home.”
Despite having completed his prison sentence, Munshi is still on the hook. Before he can go anywhere, the Mongolian government insists he must first pay influential Mongolian businessman - someone, who for legal reasons, we’ll call The Mogul – 31.7 billion tugriks, or around $13.5 million.
Munshi’s lawyer, Battisson, previously worked in the mining sector abroad, doing “due diligence on enormous mining projects” before specialising in human rights. She has pored over his documents and says it’s abundantly clear his mining assets were stripped from him while he was in jail, and that those assets are now worth billions. “And they’ve been sold off to the Chinese,” she says. “They were high-quality coal and uranium licences.”
Born in Pakistan, raised and educated in England, Munshi moved to Australia in 1987 to work in the Leinster gold fields in Western Australia. From there he built a solid career and moved up through the ranks of companies like Barrick Mining, Great Central Mines, Ashanti Goldfields and Johannesburg Consolidated Investments, or JCI.
AFR Weekend spoke with numerous associates and investors in Munshi’s businesses. They describe him as a clever storyteller with a nose for a good mining project. And most importantly for someone in the mining caper, he was very good at raising money.
“He was always prepared to take risks,” one US-based investor said. “He had a pool of people around the world he could call on for capital. He treated companies like pockets in his jacket, forever moving money in and out of them. But he knew what he was doing.”
And then, in the early 2000s, he set his sights on Mongolia. The ancient territory, once ruled by Genghis Khan, was emerging from socialism and the possibilities for chancers like Mo Munshi, it seemed, were as vast as the frigid plains.
“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
— Mo Munshi about his deal with Malaysian financier Jho Low
In 2000, Canadian billionaire Robert Friedland unearthed the treasures hidden beneath the Gobi Desert. The deposits of Oyu Tolgoi were immense, with rivers of copper and gold stretching for kilometres. Munshi, the smooth-talking geologist-turned-financier, became a key figure in Friedland’s fundraising blitz for his company Ivanhoe Mines. Between 2001 and 2006, he flitted across time zones in Friedland’s private jet, pitching Oyu Tolgoi to sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and investment banks.
By the time Rio Tinto muscled in as the project’s long-term partner, Ivanhoe Mines had raised more than $US500 million, much of it thanks to Munshi’s ability to tell a compelling story about those rivers of gold and copper.
Those years cemented Munshi’s belief that Mongolia was the new frontier. After Friedland and Rio settled into a long and fractious partnership with the Mongolian state over Oyu Tolgoi, Munshi staked his own claims. By 2006, he secured rights to two vast coking coal deposits. Early studies suggested the mines could yield more than 300 million tonnes of coal, with the added bonus that China’s ravenous steel mills were just across the border.
Munshi formed Gobi Coal & Energy and quickly courted heavyweight investors – HSBC’s Sir John Bond, Rothschild family scion Fred Durr, and US hedge funds. By 2010, the company was gearing up for a $US500 million IPO in Hong Kong or Toronto. Coal prices were soaring thanks to China’s industrial boom, the start of a commodities’ super cycle.
But then he was ordered to dance with the Mongolian bear. Munshi was invited to a barbecue in the sprawling compound to meet with some very high-level Mongolians. As the steaks sizzled, one high-level government official cornered him and advised that Gobi Coal & Energy’s shareholder register was “too foreign” for his liking. “I was told that in Mongolia you needed to have Mongolians on your register,” says Munshi.
To smooth his path, that person steered him toward a friend who he said could help. His mate was The Mogul, the head of a Mongolian corporation. It was suggested the pair should meet at Ulaanbaatar’s towering Chinggis Khaan Hotel.
With coal prices hitting record highs, Munshi was keen to cement his local credentials. Over dinner at the Chinggis Khaan, The Mogul made it clear he wanted in. For weeks afterward, Munshi’s phone rang constantly as The Mogul peppered him with calls to finalise a deal. His brother, was circling too – flying him to Hong Kong and Singapore, taking Munshi out to long banquets, and even to the notorious hooker’s bar in Singapore, the Brix, where, Munshi recalls, “the staff seemed to know him by name”.
“He was like a leech,” Munshi says. “The guy just wouldn’t let go of me. He wanted to get that coal project.“
By late 2010, Munshi thought he had a better option. Talks with Mount Kellett, a Hong Kong fund formed by ex-Goldman Sachs bankers, were close to a deal at $3.50 a share. When Munshi pushed the price to $4 on the back of new feasibility results, the Americans walked and the Mongolian brothers stepped in.
Over drinks in Singapore, a deal was sealed. Between late 2010 and mid-2011, The Mogul invested $US20 million in three tranches, all wired to Gobi’s Hong Kong account under an offshore vehicle. According to transaction documents and contracts seen by AFR Weekend, the money never touched Mongolia.
Munshi was surprised by the lack of due diligence. No detailed reviews, no site visits. But the senior government figures had vouched for The Mogul, and Gobi’s board decided a powerful Mongolian name would insulate the company from the disputes Rio Tinto was facing at Oyu Tolgoi. With $US20 million fresh in the bank, Munshi and his team, led by veteran geologist Neil Rutherford, pressed ahead.
Then, in July 2011, while holidaying with his family in Thailand’s Koh Samui, Munshi’s phone rang again. It was the son of the senior Mongolian government official, who was then working in New York. He had an introduction: a Malaysian financier named Jho Low.
The Malaysian dealmaker would soon become infamous as the architect of the 1MDB scandal, but Low was then a rising star. Educated at Harrow and Wharton, a fixture in Hollywood parties with Leonardo DiCaprio and Paris Hilton, Low presented himself as a wizard with the wand to unlock sovereign wealth funds. “They loved the coal in Mongolia story,” Munshi says.
Soon Low and his cousin were pitching Munshi on a joint venture between Malaysia’s 1MDB fund and Abu Dhabi’s Aabar Investments. They were looking for projects and Gobi Coal looked perfect. Munshi opened Gobi’s data room. The Low’s due diligence lasted just days. “No hard questions, no models. It was like the deal was already done,” he says.
He pitched for $30 million. Low came back with a staggering $91 million private placement at $6.50 a share – valuing Gobi at $650 million. For a pre-IPO coal company in Mongolia, it was extraordinary.
“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Munshi says. “The board was incredibly enthusiastic. And why not? At the time, you had two sovereign wealth funds knocking at the door, offering a very, very good price. Of course, they’re both poison now. But back then, the deal spoke to the value of these coal and uranium assets.“
But there was a catch. As part of the agreement, $14 million was skimmed off the top as “brokerage fees,” $9 million to the Malaysian side and $5 million to Abu Dhabi’s Aabar. According to contracts seen by AFR Weekend, the transfers were made in cash, not shares, routed through two British Virgin Islands shells: Blackstone Asia Real Estate Partners and Globalink Private Aviation.
“I said, ‘Why cash?’” Munshi recalls. “They didn’t want shares. That should’ve been the warning.”
Years later, that $14 million, along with $11.5 million in feasibility costs, would be bundled into a $40 million fraud accusation against Munshi. He insists it was engineered to cover up the kickbacks at the heart of the Aabar–1MDB deal, and to shift blame to him. “They flipped it completely around and accused me of theft,” he says.
“I had everything in writing … I thought I could reason with him.”
— Mo Munshi, speaking about The Mogul
After the initial success, the Gobi Coal project got bogged. They raised $US120 million, mostly from The Mogul and Aabar Investments in 2011. But then coal prices collapsed, following the global financial crisis, and the Gobi IPO was shelved, indefinitely.
Investors in New York and London, who’d lost money, shrugged. “It happens all the time,” one US-based fund manager said. “That’s why it’s called an IPO window because sometimes they close.” It’s the way international markets operate, but not in Mongolia. The Mogul wanted his cash, and then some.
Mongolia was unnerving foreign investors. In 2012, parliament passed a law requiring 51 per cent domestic ownership of “strategic” projects. Many foreign companies simply packed up and left. Rio Tinto was fighting tooth and nail to get Oyu Tolgoi off the ground. And Gobi Coal was put into care and maintenance after $45 million had been spent.
Munshi was entangled with The Mogul’s family. He had lent him $10 million and more to his brother. When coal prices collapsed and the project bled cash, the loan was never repaid. Munshi took the dispute to the Hong Kong arbitration court – and won. He even secured a further order in Mongolia demanding repayment. No money ever arrived.
Instead, relations with The Mogul turned hostile. Threatening letters appeared in Munshi’s inbox. These emails, seen by AFR Weekend, accused Munshi of “cheating the Mongolian people” and claimed his resource estimates were “fake”. The language grew more aggressive with threats against Munshi’s partner and family, who were living in Beijing.
Munshi was rattled. “It shook me, particularly the references to my partner,” he recalls. But he booked a ticket to Mongolia anyway. “I had shareholder agreements, I had everything in writing. We hadn’t falsified anything … I thought I could reason with him.”
Instead, he found himself being interrogated at the airport about The Mogul’s “missing millions”.
In March 2015, Munshi was making his way through the customs hall at Ulaanbaatar airport when he was intercepted by two plain-clothes police. He was frogmarched into a drab police station and his Australian and British passports were taken. For the next five hours, he was grilled about his dealings with The Mogul.
Munshi maintained that The Mogul’s company had bought shares in Gobi and that the $US20 million was an investment, not a loan. The basic mechanics of international finance fell on deaf ears with the Mongolian cops. He was released into Ulaanbaatar without his passports, but a travel ban in place. To this day, that ban has never been lifted.
“I have had many worst days of my life but that day was definitely one of the worst.”
Events 5000 kilometres to the south would add to his woes. In 2016, the smoke cleared, the mirrors cracked and the facade that had hidden the shonky dealings of Jho Low collapsed. The Malaysian financier was accused by the US Justice Department of masterminding one of the largest kleptocracy schemes in history: the siphoning of more than $US4.5 billion from the sovereign wealth fund 1MDB. Properties in New York and Beverley Hills, a $250 million yacht, art by Basquiat and Monet, and Hollywood movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, were all traced back to Low’s network.
Low fled Malaysia. Leonardo DiCaprio quietly returned gifts from the businessman, including Marlon Brando’s Oscar. And Low’s name was splashed across global headlines as the embodiment of corporate corruption.
It was a disaster for Munshi. What might have been a messy commercial dispute with The Mogul was soon recast. Prosecutors in Ulaanbaatar seized on the revelations. The $91 million private placement into Gobi Coal, once trumpeted as a coup, was now toxic. And Mongolia had just passed new laws to target white-collar crime. The commercial dispute was now a criminal prosecution.
Investigators bundled it all together: the 1MDB scandal, the $14 million “brokerage fees”, the $11.5 million feasibility studies, and the collapse of the IPO. In their telling, Munshi wasn’t a foreign geologist burned by bad luck and sagging coal prices; he was a crook who had used fraudulent data and offshore vehicles to steal millions from Mongolian investors.
The laws passed in 2012 gave them the hook. By charging him under theft provisions rather than contract or corporate statutes, they could reframe commercial risk as an act of criminal fraud. But as his lawyer, Battisson, points out, the offence that he was charged with didn’t exist at the time it was allegedly committed. “It was not a crime at the time,” she says.
When Munshi’s case was heard – with the 1MDB scandal blaring in the background – the outcome appeared preordained. He was first convicted in a lower court in 2017 of fraud and theft and sentenced to 11 years. In 2018, he appealed to the Mongolian Supreme Court. It upheld the conviction, but reduced the sentence to seven years.
The court added a condition that he was to repay The Mogul 31.7 billion tugriks, which is about $13.5 million today. He had no way of repaying The Mogul the millions the court says the Mongolian is owed. Munshi also couldn’t leave the country, despite having served his time.
“I have had many worst days of my life in the last ten years,” Munshi says of the ruling. “But that day was definitely one of the worst.”
“Unless something is done soon, he will die there. It’s as simple as that.”
— Alison Battison, Munshi’s lawyer
Following the 2018 Supreme Court sentence, Munshi was marched in shackles through the iron gates of Prison 421 – a notorious Soviet-era jail on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar.
The cell blocks were crumbling and unheated. In winter, prisoners huddled together under blankets to survive as temperature fell below minus 30. The moisture from their breath turned to ice on the walls. His illnesses worsened. Regular beatings from guards left his back and ribs scarred. Requests for medical treatment were ignored. “There was no dignity in there,” he says. “You weren’t treated as a prisoner serving time, you were treated as something less than human.”
While Munshi languished, associates of The Mogul got to work. Over the following years, new directors were installed in Gobi Coal & Energy, the name was changed and coal and uranium licences were transferred.
During that time, Khaltmaa Battulga became president of Mongolia, and under his influence the country became even more protectionist about its mineral wealth. It was common for the courts to assist in consolidating disputed mining assets into the hands of domestic elites with long-standing ties to Battulga’s faction.
Court filings, company records and some government communications reviewed by AFR Weekend show how the paper trail was rewritten. Shareholder agreements were cancelled, loans to The Mogul were reclassified, and new holding companies were stood up. Within three years, virtually every piece of Gobi Coal’s portfolio, valued at $650 million prior to the IPO, had been stripped.
From his cell, Munshi could only watch as his assets disappeared. His lawyers’ attempts to challenge transfers went nowhere. At the same time, another part of his business empire was dismantled by The Mogul’s associates.
Paramount Mining, an ASX-listed company known as PCP, had been Munshi’s Australian flagship, holding a promising gold project in Java. In 2016, as his legal troubles deepened, Paramount shareholders approved a plan to spin that project into a new Singapore-based vehicle through a one-for-one share swap. The transaction was pitched as a way to attract Asian and Middle Eastern investors, but it effectively gutted the Australian entity, leaving a shell.
Once the Singapore vehicle was established, control shifted rapidly. In 2018, while Munshi was still incarcerated, the new board, helmed by a Dubai-based associate of The Mogul, issued billions of fresh shares, expanding the register from about 800 million to roughly 20 billion. It wiped the value of earlier holdings. (This person is currently the CEO of the company that was formerly Gobi Coal & Energy, Munshi’s old company).
Within a year, Paramount collapsed into administration in Australia, sparking a drawn-out court battle over a $300,000 loan that administrators sought to claw back. Non-executive directors quietly settled, while new management in Singapore snapped up the gold assets. By the time the litigation wound down the projects had been sold off, the company was dissolved, and the paper trail disappeared into offshore structures.
“He doesn’t look Aussie and doesn’t have an Aussie sounding name.”
— Kylie Moore Gilbert, who was detained in Iran
Earlier this year, Munshi’s lawyer, Battisson, filed a number of complaints to the UN, urging the international community to step in. She hopes that the UN will launch an investigation into his plight. “Mr Munshi’s treatment by the Mongolian judiciary and government should serve as a warning to foreign investors in Mongolia,” the complaint reads. “As should the lack of support from the Australian and British governments during his trial, imprisonment and his current travel ban.”
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was seeking freedom in Britain, and avoiding extradition to the US, there was a conga line of supporters and politicians agitating on his behalf. Even Barnaby Joyce was calling for his release. Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, boasted that it took “creative nous” to secure his freedom. After he’d hopped off the private jet that had returned Assange to Australia, Rudd was asked if it was his creative nous that orchestrated the deal. He replied with faux modesty, “That’s your term, not mine.”
Mo Munshi does not have a Kevin Rudd, or even a Barnaby Joyce, in his corner. There’s no private jet on standby, waiting to whisk him from Ulaanbaatar. DFAT has said that while it is advocating on Munshi’s behalf, it cannot “intervene in another country’s legal matters”. And so he sits and waits in his drab little flat with his boxes of papers, reliant on his family for money and his lawyer who works for free.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert says part of Munshi’s dilemma is that he’s not the right type of victim for the Australian public. His plight has not captured the public’s sympathy or garnered widespread media attention. “He’s an old man,” she says. “He doesn’t look Aussie and doesn’t have an Aussie sounding name. People are less interested, unfortunately, and I think there’s a correlation between the public outcry and media attention and the level of government interest.”
Munshi tells AFR Weekend that even if he did have the money to pay The Mogal, which he doesn’t, he wouldn’t.
“I’ve never done anything wrong,” he says. “I’ve had no help from the Brits or the Aussies because they don’t want to blow Rio Tinto up.”
He says he hopes this article will put pressure on Foreign Minister Wong, and “those other useless bastards down there” to do something. “Because until they’re pressured they [the Mongolians] won’t do anything,” he says. “When they’ve stolen all these assets there’s no incentive to let me out.”
He adds: “I’m 65 years old, and I’ve got a lot of health issues, and they’d much prefer to see me leave in a box than see me walk onto a plane.”
By Jessica Sier and Greg Bearup

Published Date:2025-10-13