Still, there’s no cost to agreeing to the rescue at a vote scheduled for Feb. 26 as owners of the stock have no obligation to subsequently take up any new shares, according to Hambro. A “no” vote on the other hand puts the company’s future in doubt.

“The people who vote no are completely mad,” Hambro, who is chairman as well as founder, said in an interview. “If you vote no, or don’t vote, you could lose the lot. It’s a really stupid thing to do to take your anger out on me by not voting.”

Garden Agreement

While managing potentially irate shareholders may be one of Petropavlovsk’s problems, its immediate issue is the sheer number of people it needs to contact before the vote.

“We have identified at least 8,000 private investors,” Hambro said. “It’s really hard to get to them, to persuade them to vote. A single negative vote negates a lot of positives.” He needs approval from 75 percent to get the rescue passed, using a newspaper and web advertising campaign to try to reach them.

It’s a long way from the company’s founding 20 years ago in the garden of Hambro’s English home, where he agreed to invest $5 million in a Siberian mine near the Chinese border. That became Peter Hambro Mining Plc, renamed Petropavlovsk in 2009.

From such beginnings the stock’s fortunes went from rise to fall and rise again, then fall again. At its peak in 2006, it reached 1,750 pence in London, before crashing to 156 pence in 2008, and rebounding to 1,370 pence a year and a half later.

‘Awful Lot’

Petropavlovsk was on the cusp of winning a place among the blue-ribbon names on London’s FTSE-100 Index of leading shares until a strategy to expand output by borrowing more than $1 billion in 2009 unraveled as gold prices sank. By Monday, the stock fetched 15.75 pence, even as gold stabilized this year.

Hambro and fellow founder Pavel Maslovskiy will partly underwrite the planned sale of new shares, contributing as much as $10 million each. Should Hambro, who owns about 7 percent of the company, fully subscribe to his rights and pay the maximum underwriting figure, he could end up investing more than $40 million. “A lot of cash, an awful lot of cash,” he said.