Phil Edmonds, once one of the best spin bowlers in English cricket, would terrify and bamboozle batsmen with a combination of cunning, flamboyance and raw aggression. A huge figure with hands like buckets, he would field at alarming proximity to the bat, muttering and eyeballing his victim.

Two decades later, the same techniques have earned him a reputation as one of the most ferocious business buccaneers in a new scramble for Africa over minerals and oil.

His personal wealth is already estimated to be somewhere in excess of £45 million. This week Edmonds launched a bid for Katanga, the huge Canadian mining company operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. If the deal goes through, the linchpin of Edmonds’s business empire will climb in value to £1.7 billion. Overnight, the Middlesex cricketer who took 125 wickets for England in the 1980s, could become one of the heaviest hitters in the first XI of international business.

Interviewed in his Mayfair office, he still exudes bristling self-confidence, the same air of jovial menace. He sizes up his visitors for a second, as if eyeing a new batting pair, and then bursts into a torrent of abuse, aimed at his PR man for letting a photographer in. Moments later he is shaking hands and promising tickets for the test match. You bowl the first ball one way; and then spin it the other way.

How does it feel to be on the brink of the biggest deal of his life? “Big? What’s big, man? I thought it was big bowling to Allan Border . . . Now Javed Miandad, he was different, he just mucked you around all the time . . .” And suddenly we are off on flood of cricket reminiscence.

In this whites-to-riches story, playing sport and making business are part of the same process, a combination of chutzpah, out-thinking the opponent, and spin. The bid this week by Edmonds’s company Camec (Central African Mining and Exploration Company) for Katanga Mining valued the Canadian company at £943 million, in a merger that would form one of the largest cobalt and copper producers in Africa.

Even more controversial is Edmonds’s White Nile oil exploration company, which has been locked in a bitter battle with the French oil group Total over the rights to extract oil from an area of Southern Sudan the size of Wales and believed to hold at least one billion barrels.

Oil speculation, like cricket, is a fickle game. While Edmonds closed in on Katanga, the stock price of White Nile plunged 31 per cent in one week, after the Sudanese National Petroleum Commission asked for the company to be removed from southern Sudan.

“Katanga is the jewel,” he says. “But it’s going to be a white knuckle ride.” Edmonds plainly thrives on pressure and confrontation. As a cricketer he was hot-headed and brilliant, an expert in sledging (the ritual abuse between cricketers) and intimidation.

Simon Barnes, in his 1986 biography of the cricketer-turned businessman, A Singular Man, wrote: “He approaches spin bowling with the nature of a swashbuckler, he sees bowling as a matter of grace, style, class, and controlled aggression.” But Mike Brearley, who captained Edmonds, admitted he found him “unmanageable”.

Business opinion is similarly divide. One investor called White Nile a “jalapeno”, the spice to his portfolio. For others, Edmonds is a little too spicy. One analyst said: “With Camec there’s always a promise, a promise. They talk a good story, but they haven’t yet come through.”

Some of Edmonds’s more colourful associates have also come under scrutiny, most notably Billy Rautenbach, a large shareholder in Camec, who is facing charges of theft and fraud in South Africa. Edmonds dismisses the accusations as “politics”.

Henri-Philippe Edmonds was born in Lusaka 56 years ago, in what was Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia, father a rich British businessman. The family moved to Britain, and after a degree in land economy from Cambridge, Edmonds made his test debut in 1975, taking five wickets for 18 runs.

In 50 test matches over the next 12 years, he was always among the top wicket-takers, and seldom out of the news. His wife, the successful novelist Frances Edmonds, with whom he lives in a large Notting Hill mansion, wrote an account of cricketing life on tour that redoubled the couple’s notoriety and ensured Ian Botham’s lasting enmity. She said of the all-rounder: “I had been brought up to mistrust anyone whose bodyweight in kilos is numerically superior to his IQ.”

Retiring from cricket in 1987, Edmonds plunged into business with the same granite self-belief he had shown on the field. His first foray was into the leisure and property industries, then mining for gold in the Philippines (a failure), then Russian steel. Edmonds has been the director of more than 40 companies.

But it was in Africa that Edmonds saw the best opportunities, in Angola, the Congo and Sudan, digging out platinum in South Africa and tantalum in Zimbabwe. Edmonds, and his Zimbabwe-born partner Andrew Groves (to whom he credits much of their success) insist their brand of entrepreneurialism is different from the colonial exploitation of the past, since it aims to enrich Africans while turning a handsome profit.

They are particularly proud of a grain-buying project in Mozambique, which they claim is helping to provide a livelihood for some 250,000 families. “I have the greatest respect for Bob Geldof and the guys,” Edmonds chuckles. “But these people don’t want aid. They want to earn money” Four years ago Edmonds and Groves spotted an opening in Sudan, then emerging from two decades of horrific civil war. They contacted the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the southern rebel group, and, after meetings, often deep in the bush, struck a deal to explore for oil in Southern Sudan. Edmonds described his pitch to the Wall Street Journal: “This is your oil. Why deal with Big Oil, who will give you a few scraps, when you can form your own oil company with us?”

The Sudanese civil war ended in 2005 with semi-autonomy for Southern Sudan, opening the way for White Nile to start drilling. Promising “oil for the people”, White Nile floated on London’s Alternative Investment Market. In four days, its share price rose from 10p to 138p. Edmonds’s £15,000 stake had become, on paper, £19 million.

The French energy giant Total, however, said it had a deal with Sudan’s national government going back to 1980. The ensuing row pitted the fledgeling British company against the French energy giant, and the national government in Khartoum against the new regional government of the south. Edmonds demonstrated that he had lost none of his sledging talents, blasting Total for “neocolonialism”.

But in many ways, Edmonds himself seems a throwback to an earlier age. When he talks of “hunting down opportunities” it is the language of the opportunistic big-game hunter. Here is the white sportsman striding into the bush to make his fortune among the fighting tribes, exploring new business ventures with the brash certainty of a Livingstone: Joseph Conrad meets modern capitalism.

Today, the once-rangy Edmonds more resembles a bear. “Do I look like I still play cricket?” he says, patting his paunch. But he still sizes up the opposition with ruthless eyes. One moment, he is discussing the various African politicians, business allies and rivals, and next, in the same bullish voice, he is reconquering old adversaries. “Geoffrey [Boycott] was the easiest to bowl to because he was predictable, but the hardest to get out. Whereas with Viv Richards, you knew he just wanted to blast the s*** out of you.”

Before the summer is over, Edmonds could find himself head of a company the size of National Express, and controlling a mining empire stretching across Africa. On the other hand, if the bid for Katanga fails and his company is thrown out of Sudan, then Edmonds will be trudging back to the pavilion to think again.

But that is the nature of the game, and it always was.

Success after sport

Sir Roger Bannister First man to run the four-minute mile had a glittering medical career, becoming director of the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford

Mike Brearley Former Middlesex and England cricket captain led England to the Ashes in 1981 and is to become president of the MCC in October. Now a a psychoanalyst. Wrote The Art of Captaincy

Colin Moynihan Boat Race-winning cox won a silver medal at the 1980 Olympics, before becoming the Conservative MP for Lewisham, serving as Sports Minister. He is now Lord Moynihan, and chairman of the British Olympic Association

Source: Times database

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• He stole my son, now I’m alone in hell
• Back on the air, but don’t mention Mugabe
• Ten kitchen gadget gift ideas