Guzman..The perfect getaway??? "At the time, investors, government officials and journalists wondered why de Guzman would kill himself? The official reason was that he had contracted an incurable disease. Susani, his wife in Manado, was reported to have said he had suffered terribly from malaria and chronic hepatitis. Yet, the jungle-hardened geologist's brother, his wife in Samarinda, and former colleagues and associates paint a picture of a man who was anything but suicidal in the months before his death.
"We can never accept that he was involved in a scam like this," declares de Guzman's younger brother and confidant, Simplicio "Jojo" de Guzman Jr. He says Mike -- a man who likened himself to the Indiana Jones character in the Raiders of the Lost Ark films and wore cowboy hats, rugged jackets, boots and belts with big buckles -- was healthy and active. Simplicio adds that the suicide claim is suspect because of a series of letters found in Mike's bag on the day he died. "He wrote of the things he would do the next day, the next week," says the brother. He also sees the suicide note as suspect. "If everybody is basing the suicide theory simply on this note, there's more to it than that." Simplicio says he saw the note when he, sister Diane and Mike's Manila wife Teresa de Guzman went to Jakarta to retrieve the body. In it, Simplicio says Teresa's name is shortened to "Thess." That was very strange, he says, since Mike usually referred to her either as Tess or mahal (beloved).
Filipino compatriots who knew de Guzman are also suspicious. "[In the months] before they say he committed suicide, he was playing basketball; he looked healthy," says a former colleague, now in Samarinda, who worked with de Guzman in the Philippines years ago. De Guzman was popular among locals, often handing out presents -- he once gave a security officer cash to buy a new pair of shoes. When de Guzman's body was brought to the local hospital in Samarinda, people queued up to pay their last respects. Says the former colleague: "There was an attempt to fool investors, but Mike [de Guzman] was not the guy to do it."
The testimony of the helicopter pilot who was taking de Guzman to Busang on March 19 only added more mystery to the death. Lt.-Col. Edi Tursono, a pilot with PT Indonesia Air Transport, had been flying the geologist to the site for over two years. During intense police questioning after de Guzman's fall, he told police that he felt a gust of wind in the French Alouette III helicopter, looked round and saw the door was open and his passenger gone. But in a detail added later, police said Tursono indicated he had seen de Guzman jumping just after scribbling notes and removing his Rolex watch. Tursono is currently staying in army barracks in Jakarta and has not clarified the sequence of events.
The pilot's attempts to find de Guzman's body in the swampy terrain were unsuccessful. Search parties from Samarinda went out and four days later, police said they had recovered de Guzman's remains. Sources say the body was badly decomposed, wild boars had chewed at his exposed innards and his jaw was smashed. An autopsy in Manila confirmed the findings of an earlier one done in Indonesia: the body was de Guzman's. But many remain unconvinced since dental and fingerprint records were slow to come forth and the autopsy took several weeks to be completed.
Some people have started to wonder whether de Guzman may have staged his own death and gone into hiding rather than face Freeport's auditors at the site. The geologist is known to have cashed in more than 150,000 of his 400,000 Bre-X options in 1996, perhaps worth a few million dollars in Bre-X shares. Others wonder whether he was killed. Either way, there is one thing on which mining experts concur: the operation would have required the collaboration and detailed organization of a large group of individuals to carry out a fraud of this scale. De Guzman was known to have been very secretive about his work at Busang and to have trusted only a small group of colleagues, possibly all of them Filipinos.
There were signs early on that Bre-X geologists were up to funny business. There are standard procedures used to avoid "salting," industry jargon for adding gold to the collected rock samples before they are tested. Normally, exploration companies split samples and send half to an independent laboratory for assaying. The remainder is locked away for cross-checking. But Bre-X geologists chose to crush the bulk of each sample before sending it to Indo Assay -- an independent laboratory in Kalimantan -- saving only a small flat piece of the sample's core. The system ensured that little was left against which to correlate the laboratories' results.
What's more, some of the crushing of samples took place on site at the Busang deposit rather than at Indo Assay. "A video taken by an analyst at Busang showed that Bre-X had all the preparatory facilities on site, giving them the opportunity to add whatever they wanted," says Geoff Davis, director of Golden Valley Mines, an Australian firm. Golden Valley advises Kreung Gasui, a local exploration company that questioned Bre-X's right to Busang and has taken its case to court in Canada. A second Golden Valley geologist notes that it would not have taken much to lace samples with gold from another source before sending them to the lab. Warren Beckwith estimates 1 kg of gold (worth about $11,000) is needed for every batch of 10,000 samples. "You're not looking at a huge amount of gold," he says.
In its report, Strathcona said the salting process was relatively simple and obvious. That is why many observers are surprised that no one detected anything unusual was going on for so long. Just as puzzling: there was no public questioning after a fire at the Busang site destroyed de Guzman's records and other files on Jan. 23. Jakarta-based geologists unrelated to Bre-X, however, say that the lack of scrutiny was not that strange because of the mine's remote location. It was also normal practice for Bre-X to use mostly unskilled workers. "They just follow instructions," says one geologist.
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