Here's an article from Forbes mag FYI - I won't respond to anyone trashing me for posting an article so don't bother. If this was a positive article, I would have posted that here.
As long as there is gold, there will be suckers. Lee
Furlong is better at mining the latter than the former.
Glitter, but not gold
By Zina Moukheiber
Other desert dirts
LEE FURLONG says his Toronto-based
International Precious Metals Corp. has discovered
gold and platinum amidst the desert shrubs 90
miles west of Phoenix, right off Interstate 10.
Echoing his enthusiasm, analyst Gavin Wilson of T.
Hoare & Co. claims there are between 12.5 million
and 25 million ounces of the shiny stuff. Furlong, a
burly 58-year-old, unfurls from a red bandanna two
vials containing about one-quarter ounce each of
yellow and black powder. "It's like a toy box, full of
wonderful toys," he says with a grin.
Some big fund operators have been eager to play.
Capital Research & Management Co., which has
$150 billion under management through American
Funds, owns almost 12% of International Precious
Metals. Midas Fund, the London-based precious
metals fund, has picked up 200,000 shares. IPM's
stock is trading on Nasdaq at 815/16, more than
double its price one year ago, bringing its market
capitalization to almost $160 million.
Enthusiasts would do well to check out Furlong's
credentials. In 1959 he dropped out of Central
Washington College of Education in Ellensburg,
Wash. and left for Australia. There he worked as a
field hand for a geophysical consulting firm.
In the late 1970s, Furlong says, he discovered and
developed one of Australia's biggest gold deposits,
the Paddington Mine, formerly owned by
Pancontinental Ltd. and now by Sydney-based
Renison Goldfields Consolidated Ltd. But that's not
what others say. Paddington's former chief
geologist, Ian Robertson, says Furlong was just a
field technician with no expertise in geology. Other
ex-Pancontinental executives confirm this.
This much is true: While at Pancontinental, Furlong
met Alan (Oily) Doyle, a geologist. Doyle has been
behind several Australian mining exploration
companies that eventually faded after announcing
big discoveries and ramping up their stock prices.
In the early 1990s Furlong returned to the U.S. He
discovered not gold but a shell company called
International Platinum Corp., trading on the Toronto
Stock Exchange. The company had been exploring
for platinum in North America, and its chief
executive had recently died.
Furlong and Doyle took over International Platinum,
and in 1993, at a gold conference in Las Vegas,
met Dale Runyon, who calls himself a business
consultant. "This guy came up to me and said,
'Have I got a proposition for you,'" recalls Furlong.
This was the Arizona property named BRX.
Doyle raised $27 million through private
placements with the help of T. Hoare &Co. He and
Furlong used the money to buy the find from
Runyon. In gushing press releases, Furlong quickly
announced there was gold and platinum in minable
quantities at BRX. That caught the attention of
Toronto Stock Exchange officials, who requested
that a Toronto mining engineering firm verify
International Platinum's samples. Negative. The
exchange asked the Arizona Department of Mines
&Mineral Resources to check, too. Again, no
worthwhile ore.
The investigations involved a so-called fire assay.
This is a standard industry technique for analyzing
the amount of gold in a soil sample. "The fire assay
has been the tried-and-tested method for assaying
gold and platinum for many years," says Graham
Farquharson, owner of Strathcona Mineral
Services, the mining consulting firm that blew the lid
off Bre-X Minerals. "There's no particular geology
that's too difficult to handle through a fire assay."
With the negative results from the fire assay, the
Toronto Exchange suspended the shares and, later
in 1994, delisted them. But you can't keep a good
promoter down. Alan Doyle came on officially as
chairman, and the company subsequently changed
its name to International Precious Metals.
Paul Mentzer, vice president of IPM's technical
services, argues: "There is not a single fire assay
recipe that works on every material." He says IPM
has developed its own leaching method to assay
and recover gold.
With such gobbledygook, Furlong is out there with
his Internet site (www.ipmcf.com), where he
breathlessly chronicles progress.
Investors, be wary.
Other desert dirts
Be extreamly skeptcal of any of these prescious metal stocks. These
companies say they're developing their own their own testing and extracting
methods for gold.
Company
headquarters
Exchange
Market
cap
($mil
Claim
Location of
deposits
Global Platinum
& Gold
Salt Lake City,
Utah
o-t-c
$35
Over 80 million
tons of ore,
including gold
and platinum
Buckeye and
Wickenburg,
Ariz.
LS Capital Corp
(formerly Lone
Star Casino)
Houston, Tex.
o-t-c
9
Has not yet
released gold
values
Tecopa and
Barstow, Calif.
Naxos
Resources
Vancouver, B.C.
o-t-c*
47
Reporting "very
good" results, as
much as
one-quarter of
an ounce of gold
per ton of ore
Death Valley
Junction, Calif.
*Shares suspended from the Alberta Stock Exchange in Sept. 1996. |
