* China Minmetals unit buys all 3 inventories in onlineauction
* Antimony, terbium oxide, dysprosium oxide sold for $110mln
* Inventory sold at auction starting prices set by Kunmingcourt(Recasts to lead with details of auctions winner)
By Shivani Singh and Judy Hua
BEIJING, Sept 1 (Reuters) - The rare earths arm ofstate-owned China Minmetals Corp on Sunday bought metal and rareearth inventories formerly held by the defunct Fanya MetalExchange as the sole bidder in online auctions, paying 780.4million yuan ($110 million).
China Minmetals Rare Earth Co bought three lotsof antimony, terbium oxide and dysprosium oxide for startingprices set by the Kunming Intermediate People's Court, accordingto the e-commerce site that hosted the auction. The prices paidare below current market value.
The Fanya exchange was launched in 2011 in Kunming, insouthwest China's Yunnan province, with the aim of raising theprices of minor metals like bismuth by building up stockpilesusing money borrowed from thousands of individual investors.
But the exchange froze transactions and members' accounts in2015 after experiencing "liquidity" problems and was later takenover by government investigators.
The auctions on Taobao, a platform owned by e-commerce giantAlibaba, are being closely watched by creditors of thebourse owed nearly 40 billion yuan following its collapse in2015, as well as by minor metals and rare earth traders giventhe significant volumes coming on to the market.
A 24-hour auction of about 18,661 tonnes of antimony, theentire stock of the metal used in fire retardants that Fanyaheld when it folded, ended at 1000 Beijing time (0200 GMT) onSunday, with a China Minmetals Rare Earth Co bid of 546.1million yuan securing the lot.
That price works out at around 29,264 yuan a tonne, or 18.7%discount to the current spot price. Chinese spot antimonyprices, as assessed by industry data provider Asian Metal<AM-99C-ANT>, have fallen by almost 28% so far this year, to36,000 yuan a tonne, amid the Fanya stock overhang.
Global antimony production in 2018 was 140,000 tonnes,according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with China accountingfor more than 70% of supply. The Fanya volume auctioned isequivalent to more than 13% of last year's global output.
The Kunming Intermediate People's Court, which previouslysold some of the bourse's indium ingots on Taobao, had put itsmarket value 25% higher at 682.6 million yuan.
The other two simultaneous auctions that concluded on Sundaywere of 4.05 tonnes of terbium oxide - a type of rare earth usedin fluorescent lamps and colour television tubes - and 148.75tonnes of dysprosium oxide, used in ceramics and lasers.
The volumes, also representing the entire inventory of thosecompounds that Fanya held, were won with China Minmetals RareEarth Co bids of 12.8 million yuan and 221.5 million yuan,respectively, according to the auction pages.
($1 = 7.0928 Chinese yuan renminbi)(Reporting by Judy Hua, Shivani Singh and Tom DalyEditing by Kenneth Maxwell)