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On paper, Mick Davis looks like the quintessential mining success story: In less than four years, he has piloted Xstrata PLC from obscurity into one of the largest metals firms in the world, and the prickly South African is widely recognized as a brilliant mining executive.

But he can't seem to escape a murky air of secrecy and intrigue that surrounds his company. Whenever Xstrata launches a bid to buy a foreign mining firm, as it did unsuccessfully last year with Australia's Western Mining Corp. Holdings Ltd. and Wednesday with its bid to buy Falconbridge Ltd., the dark rumours and conspiracy theories fill the air.

They seem to bedevil the big, brusque executive, who would prefer to be known for his relentless and uncompromising approach to acquisitions, and for the shockingly independent style he demonstrated Wednesday when he scorned and ridiculed some of the industry's biggest institutional investors during conference calls.

Mr. Davis, a 48-year-old father of three, was once financial director of Australian mining company Billiton, where one of his big deals was buying Canada's Rio Algom Ltd. He left in late 2001 when BHP bought Billiton to form BHP Billiton Ltd.

Since he joined Xstrata that same year, he has doubled the company's size every year, snapping up mining operations around the world almost weekly, to the point that it now has 26,000 employees and pretax profit last year of $2.5-billion (U.S.).

Still, when Xstrata starts making big deals abroad, people start mentioning words far removed from mining, or from anything having to do with Mick Davis: Saddam Hussein, CIA, international fugitives, presidential pardons.

This has nothing to do with Xstrata, a public company traded on the London Stock Exchange, and everything to do with the private company that created Xstrata in 1990 and that is still its largest shareholder. Glencore International AG, one of the most secretive and most profitable private companies in the world, is both the source of Mr. Davis's success and the albatross around his neck.

Glencore was created by Marc Rich, the billionaire commodities trader who became the world's most-wanted white-collar fugitive in the 1990s, when he was sought by U.S. authorities for tax evasion and tax fraud, and for breaking UN embargoes by trading with countries such as Iran and apartheid-era South Africa. In 2000, in the final weeks of his presidency, Bill Clinton granted Mr. Rich, a Democratic Party donor, a controversial pardon.

Both Xstrata and Glencore are headquartered in Zug, Switzerland, a tiny canton that claims to have the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe. It also has extremely lax disclosure rules, and can serve as a haven for white-collar fugitives — as it did throughout the 1990s, when Mr. Rich made it his refuge.

“Glencore was created as a shadow company to divert attention from Marc Rich & Co. in New York when the feds were going after Rich for fraud,” said Craig Copetas, the Bloomberg News reporter whose book Metal Men investigated the history of Mr. Rich and Glencore. “They were trying to hide all the bad stuff from Rich, but the judge didn't have anything to do with it.”

A few years earlier, in 1990, Mr. Rich had created Xstrata as a mineral exploitation subsidiary of his metal trading firm. They are separate now, although Glencore controls 38 per cent of Xstrata's shares either directly or through its wholly owned subsidiaries. The two firms share a chairman, Willy Strothotte, a long-time colleague of Mr. Rich's.

Mr. Davis and other Xstrata executives argue that the taint of Mr. Rich is unfair. According to U.S. media reports, Mr. Rich sold his major stake in Glencore for $500-million more than a decade ago, and while it is widely believed among metal traders that Mr. Rich still has his hands in the operation, there has never been any evidence of such control.

Glencore continues to be a controversial company: In 2004, the CIA charged that the company had received millions from the Iraqi oil-for-food program after paying millions in kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime (Glencore denied these charges).

Mr. Davis is indignant at any suggestion that the legacy of Mr. Rich touches his business in any way. “I don't even know Marc Rich,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail Wednesday. “Marc Rich has not been involved with Glencore since the early 1990s.... We operate independently of Glencore.”

But the associations follow him. Wednesday, Canada's United Steelworkers Union referred to Xstrata's “worrisome history” in its denunciation of the takeover bid. Executives from Inco Ltd. and Falconbridge have made similar murmurings, so far off the record, about the company, and U.S. mining unions and congressmen Wednesday were eager to suggest that the takeover was the work of Mr. Rich.

Are those looking to undo the deal likely to find any such connection? Mr. Copetas, the chronicler of Glencore, said that if there were any lingering connection, it would be more one of spirit. He says Xstrata is deeply imbued with Mr. Rich's style and philosophy. He notes that four of Xstrata's 12 board members, including its chairman, are former or current executives of Glencore, and all of them have worked directly under Mr. Rich. (Xstrata officials argue that Glencore, as the largest shareholder, has the right to appoint these board members and that this has nothing to do with Xstrata.)

“What I would say is that the culture of Marc Rich is still very much in effect at Glencore, and that the people who do the deals with Xstrata are Glencore people,” Mr. Copetas said. “All of these people were Rich's acolytes — they were all trained by Rich.”