Selection Trust was a British mining finance house. It was started in 1913 by A. Chester Beatty, a mining engineer from the United States. After the end of the First World War, Beatty built up a substantial portfolio of mining interests, many of them in Africa, but others in Serbia and in Siberia. Initially the company began operations by sharing an office at Number One London Wall in the City of London with the consulting firm of Herbert Hoover, a fellow American mining engineer. The company was chiefly known for its investments in mining for base metals, diamonds and oil. The countries in which it operated included the US, Canada, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Burma, Australia, South Africa, Angola, Tanzania, Northern Rhodesia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, French Guinea, Botswana, Hungary, Russia, Yugoslavia and the USSR. It was pioneer in the early days of the North Sea oil and gasfields. Structure Mining finance houses were principally holding companies that create subsidiaries in which they either partly or wholly owned the capital of the mining companies in the group, but mostly maintained control. Many of these subsidiaries were listed on the same as the master company or on other stock exchanges. In the case of Selection Trust, many of these entities were clearly group companies due to their naming. Examples of this were Consolidated African Selection Trust, Rhodesian Selection Trust, Gold Coast Selection Trust and Sierra Leone Selection Trust. Rhodesian Selection Trust One of the key early building blocks of the mining finance house was its interests in the copper belt of Central Africa. The Rhodesian Selection Trust Limited (RST) was a copper mining corporation which operated in the Copperbelt region of Northern Rhodesia. In 1926, RST took over the Roan Antelope and Rietbok claims from the Bwana Mkubwa Company and the Rhodesia Copper and General Exploration and Finance Company, with the RST dominating the company shareholdings. Rhodesian Selection Trust was formed in 1928. The company was renamed Roan Selection Trust in 1964 after the break-up of the Central African Federation and the independence of Northern Rhodesia as the new state of Zambia. Other Ventures in the USSR One of the company's least successful ventures was a partnership with Calouste Gulbenkian in which the new Leninist regime of the Soviet Union awarded the Lena Goldfields and the Tetiuhe Mining Company to the partners. Faction fighting with the USSR ultimately made