The people who run the house.

David Richardson is Chief Executive Officer of GWB Trading Inc. Born and raised in Southern California, he is the son of a Marine Corps Vietnam veteran. He played baseball, football, martial arts, track, and boxing, graduated Oceanside High School in 1981, and studied business and economics at Long Beach City College and California State University. An early NFL tryout ended after a head-on collision with a drunk driver.

He returned to Southern California, did close-protection work for entertainers, and went back into banking at Union Bank and in the savings-and-loan business. After the savings-and-loan collapse he moved to Arizona, opened nightclubs and restaurants, managed championship boxers, and ran an exotic-car rental. International banking then took him abroad. He spent more than forty years building relationships he still uses.

GWB Trading Inc. works rare earths, industrial and battery minerals, aluminum, lithium, and related feedstock, with the purpose of moving offtake to the United States. He built a forty-year international banking network that GWB uses with ministries, state-owned producers, funds, and U.S. offtakers. He moved the company into a critical-minerals house on rare earths, lithium, aluminum, and companion minerals, and placed GWB in mine-to-market deals through acquisitions, fund raises, mineral-rights negotiation, and government-to-government brokerage.

As Chief Executive Officer he directs the mineral book and which positions GWB takes. He leads acquisitions of smaller mining, trading, logistics, and processing companies. He leads capital formation with hedge funds, commodity desks, and family offices. He leads negotiation of mining and mineral rights, royalties, streaming, volume, tenor, and the path from pit or brine field to port.

He serves as the bilateral critical-minerals intermediary between producing governments and U.S. industrial and defense demand, with the commercial close meant to land in an American plant. He maintains the relationships that let GWB introduce a ministry to a fund, a junior miner to a U.S. offtaker, and a finished parcel of mineral to domestic industry.

Leandro Silvas is Chief Operating Officer of GWB Trading Inc., where he helps lead the company’s operations, strategic development, relationship building, and execution across its global mining, commodities, and corporate ventures.

Silvas brings nearly two decades of leadership experience spanning organizational management, community development, public-sector operations, board governance, business development, and strategic partnerships. Throughout his career he has built a reputation for bringing people together, developing strong working relationships, and moving complex initiatives from discussion to execution.

As COO he works alongside Chief Executive Officer David Richardson and the executive leadership team on domestic and international opportunities in critical minerals, mining, commodities, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships. His responsibilities include coordinating stakeholders, assisting with operational strategy, developing key relationships, supporting negotiations, and keeping projects aligned from opportunity through execution.

He has led teams and organizations where accountability, communication, financial stewardship, and operational execution are essential: directing personnel and facilities, overseeing programs and large-scale events, developing policies and procedures, managing budgets and resources, and working with executive leadership, governing bodies, community organizations, and outside partners.

He also has extensive board and nonprofit experience, including executive roles in philanthropy, community investment, youth development, and organizational governance. At GWB he uses that record to strengthen the relationships, infrastructure, and commercial pathways that move critical and strategic materials through reliable supply chains and into U.S. industrial markets. His standard is trust, accountability, follow-through, and long-term value: the right people, a structure that can carry the work, and a result that lasts.

Sam Lam is Chief Financial Officer of GWB Trading at the head corporate office. He is responsible for financial strategy, capital, budgets, forecasts, investment analysis, and the financial performance of the company, including all acquisition properties.

He carries the corporate financial responsibility for the smelting and processing plants, mines, rare-commodity book, and properties GWB owns or acquires, including cost, capital spending, inventory value, environmental and closure reserves, and consolidated reporting.

He works with the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Operating Officer, the Chief Compliance Officer, and the Chief of Staff on mining negotiations and on the company’s other operations. In those negotiations he handles valuation, pricing, financing, due diligence, and the financial terms. He puts the pricing, bonding, working capital, contract margin, and audited reporting in place so GWB can supply precious and critical minerals to United States government and defense customers.

Acquisitions of mines, plants, buildings, and other properties run through his office for valuation, financing, due diligence, and closing. Cash, risk, hedges, controls, tax, and financial reporting to the Chief Executive Officer and the board remain with him.

Jeffrey Diehl is a U.S. Navy veteran and Inland Empire entrepreneur whose career has moved from classified Cold War submarine support to critical-minerals work aimed at U.S. government and defense supply chains. He enlisted in the Navy and served as a data-processing technician aboard the submarine tender USS Holland (AS-32). After loading at a naval weapons station, the ship headed toward the Azores, then docked at Holy Loch, Scotland, relieving USS Canopus. For several years he helped refit nuclear ballistic-missile submarines. Holding a secret clearance, he processed data on missile movements and warhead loads as boats prepared for deterrent patrols. He was honorably discharged and used the GI Bill to attend college.

That early work put him inside the logistics of strategic weapons, shipyard refit, and controlled materials. In 1996 he underwent surgery to remove two brain tumors. The operation destroyed his pituitary gland. Determined to take charge of his health, he researched nutritional products and in 1999 founded Nitro2Go Inc. in Highland, California. The company began with high-dose vitamin energy-formula packets, added energy drinks in 2003, and later launched the 2-ounce Instant Energy shot. By early 2008 the shot had sold more than half a million units, 7-Eleven carried the line nationwide, and the business had grown from a single office into a full building plus warehouse. He also worked to place the brand with military and special-operations customers.

As a boy in Riverside he sold paperback books door-to-door from a red wagon. He later published a newspaper and ran a radio station. With his wife he hosted an annual Christmas toy festival for underprivileged children in San Bernardino and regularly supported about 30 charities. He has said he failed more times than he succeeded, and that overnight success is a myth. The constant is the work ethic he practiced in the Navy, then applied to college, recovery, and building a company from a Highland warehouse.

He now serves as Chief Compliance Officer of GWB Trading Inc. The company partners with foreign governments to move critical minerals into the United States for government use. Aluminum-lithium and related strategic materials sit at the center of that work: lightweight, high-strength inputs used in aerospace and defense platforms, inside the industrial base the country is trying to rebuild at home. Diehl is helping stand up three aluminum-lithium facilities in Texas and Missouri, to shorten overseas dependence and put processing capacity on U.S. soil.

Ann Lee Chang is Chief Marketing Officer of GWB Trading Inc. She holds the commercial presentation of the house: how GWB is introduced to offtakers, funds, producing counterparties, and the sister companies under Deus Vult.

The office is the marketing mandate of the group’s minerals and ventures lane. Introductions, the public face of a transaction, and the way GWB speaks for Deus Vult in this business run through her. A longer personal biography has not yet been issued by the company.

Fong Tse is a strategic executive and business operator serving as Chief of Staff and Strategic Development at GWB Trading Inc. He works directly with company leadership on corporate strategy, business development, strategic partnerships, mergers and acquisitions, organizational development, and the execution of growth initiatives.

His career spans private enterprise, investment, corporate development, portfolio-company leadership, government, and complex institutional operations. He brings transaction experience, entrepreneurial operating experience, executive advisory work, and more than two decades in high-stakes organizations, negotiations, regulatory environments, and competing stakeholder interests.

As Director of M&A at Gemelli Capital Trust, he has worked in business incubation, acquisitions, capital formation, and the development of operating companies across emerging and strategic industries. That work has included evaluating investment opportunities, developing commercial relationships, supporting acquisitions, assisting with capital formation, and helping portfolio companies establish the management, operational, and strategic infrastructure required for growth.

His portfolio-company experience includes executive leadership in carbon reduction and carbon-conversion technologies, hydrogen and fuel-cell applications, advanced carbon materials, manufacturing and distribution, and other emerging commercial ventures. He has worked the life of a developing enterprise, from identifying the opportunity and structuring the relationship to building the management team, the partnership, the commercialization path, and a route to enterprise value.

At GWB Trading he applies that record to international resources, strategic commodities, industrial supply chains, and corporate ventures. His responsibilities cover strategic planning, opportunity development, executive coordination, relationship management, transaction support, organizational development, and moving initiatives from concept to implementation: assessing partners and transactions, coordinating stakeholders, identifying what the operation actually requires, and giving leadership a practical decision path.

Before private enterprise and investment, he spent more than two decades in progressively senior executive roles in large public institutions, including the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He advised senior executives, managers, legal counsel, and organizational stakeholders on operational, regulatory, workforce, risk, and organizational matters in an institution of more than 18,000 employees. He served as a chief negotiator across multiple labor organizations and bargaining units, and advised leadership through organizational transitions, consolidations, and changes in public-safety and government operations.

That experience shaped a leadership approach centered on strategic judgment, discretion, negotiation, stakeholder alignment, and execution. At GWB his focus is identifying high-value opportunities, strengthening strategic relationships, supporting transactions and partnerships, and building the organizational capacity the company needs to grow.