Mick Davis, the chief executive of Xstrata, has made a profit of just under £14 million from cashing in hundreds of thousands of share options in the acquisitive Swiss-based mining group in less than a month.

Mr Davis, who in October walked away from a bid to buy Anglo American, its embattled rival, yesterday exercised the option to buy 755,910 Xstrata shares for 239p each.

Awarded the options in 2001 when he became chief executive of the company, Mr Davis immediately sold the shares for £10.26 each, making a profit of £5.94 million.

Xstrata shares have almost trebled in value since January, when they were changing hands at about 360p, as the miner has ridden this year’s boom in commodities prices.

Yesterday’s sales came just three weeks after Mr Davis cashed in another two tranches of options at a profit of £7.99 million. On October 23, seven days after Xstrata dropped its interest in Anglo, he exercised 877,955 options at £2.1732 a share and 122,045 at £2.3911 apiece.

It means that he has made a total of £13.958 million out of the three awards, all granted as part of his initial contract to join the mining group.

It is the first time that Mr Davis, who has driven a series of acquisitions at Xstrata since taking over, has cashed in a substantial options award at the company.

An Xstrata spokesman said that Mr Davis was carrying out “prudent portfolio management”.

The spokesman added that, in recent years, the chief executive had been prevented from offloading any of his options holdings because of restrictions arising from the group’s involvement in takeovers.

Mr Davis is interested in a further 5.2 million of Xstrata shares, through a combination of direct holdings and options.

His direct ownership is thought to be worth at least £17 million based on the £10.14 closing price of Xstrata shares last night. He increased his holding by subscribing to the group’s £4.2 billion rights issue in March.

Last year Mr Davis, whose remuneration package is reported in dollars, received just over $5.5 million (£3.3 million) in salary, bonus and other benefits. He collected a total of $9.15 million during the previous 12-month period.

Mr Davis has transformed Xstrata since he joined the company from Billiton — now BHP Billiton, the mining rival where he was the finance director — embarking on a series of audacious acquisitions in the belief that the world’s mining sector was ripe for consolidation.

Having listed Xstrata in London in 2002, Mr Davis bought the Australian and South African coal assets of Glencore, the Swiss mining group that as a result became Xstrata’s largest investor, owning almost a third of it.

An acquisition spree followed, including an $18.8 billion deal to buy Falconbridge of Canada in 2005.

However, Mr Davis has also faced setbacks. Last year, a bid to buy Lonmin, the South African platinum producer, collapsed because of falling commodity prices.

Mr Davis walked away from Anglo after failing to agree a merger of equals with Cynthia Carroll, the group’s chief executive.

He has also had to tackle restive shareholders in the past 12 months. At the time of the rights issue, some investors protested at the way in which Glencore funded its subscription to shares through the sale of its Prodeco coalmine to Xstrata.

The group also faced an investor rebellion over pay, with a third of voting shareholders opposing Xstrata’s remuneration report at this year’s annual meeting.

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