Definitely worth reading. Finally the truth about Bre-X is beginning to emerge.
bangkokpost.com
Dead... and living happily ever after
Evidence is emerging that the perpetrator of one of the world's most spectacular gold mining scams didn't kill himself after all
By JOHN MCBETH
Jakarta _ For the journalists who covered it, Indonesia's US$5 billion Bre-X gold scandal was one of the stories of the 1990s. But for the past eight years a lingering question has never been adequately answered: After perpetrating such an elaborate scam, why didn't 40-year-old Filipino geologist Michael de Guzman have a better exit strategy than jumping 1,500 metres to his death from a helicopter? To everyone in the mining industry, it just didn't make sense.
Now evidence is emerging that his suicide may have been as much of a hoax as the scam itself. Over lunch in a Jakarta hotel, de Guzman's ethnic Dayak widow, Genie, 42, casually disclosed that only three months ago, the former Bre-X Minerals exploration manager sent her US$25,000 through a Citibank branch in Brazil.
Although she has always believed he didn't kill himself, it was the first real clue she has had that the body recovered from a Borneo swamp was not that of her husband.
It is also now coming to light that an unidentified Indonesian businessman, who knew de Guzman in earlier days, received a telephone call from him in Brazil about three or four years ago. His friends say he is reluctant to talk about the conversation because he may be asked why he has kept it secret. Because the Filipino was declared dead after a cursory autopsy, Indonesian police have never brought any charges over the biggest swindle in global mining. Bre-X Minerals was a tiny Calgary-based outfit which claimed to be sitting on a 200-million-ounce gold deposit in the forested hills of eastern Kalimantan, the Indonesian half of Borneo island. During an 18-month period of increasingly richer assay results, the company's share price soared from a few dollars to an amazing US$238 on the Toronto Stock Exchange, turning de Guzman and the company's chief geologist and vice-chairman, John Felderhof, into overnight millionaires.
On the day of de Guzman's suicide, the scam was already unravelling at a speed that was to devastate hundreds of small-time Canadian and American investors. Independent investigators called in by the government had determined that the Filipino and other accomplices had been salting core samples from Bre-X's Busang mine-site with alluvial gold and even jewellery scrapings, creating the impression of a massive ore body.
Despite what mining veterans later admitted were numerous warning signs, almost everyone _ including two of President Suharto's children and some of the world's biggest mining companies _ were sucked into the frenzy of greed generated by the purported discovery.
Coming just before 1997 financial crisis, the scandal led to the wholesale exodus of exploration firms and left the Indonesian mining industry in a state of disarray from which it has never fully recovered.
Genie, who has a nine-year-old son by de Guzman, is one of several wives he is known to have had. She recalls him leaving their Jakarta home in the early hours of March 19, 1997, carrying a flight bag stuffed with $300,000. The money was never recovered, but most mining executives were convinced then that the geologist didn't kill himself and that the corpse, found three days later lodged strangely under a tree root, was not his.
The Philippines has a worldwide reputation for arranging fake deaths. The late Edmund Pankau, a Texas-based financial investigator who often visited the Philippines and was well versed in the Bre-X case, wrote a book called How to Hide your Assets and Disappear: A Step-by-Step Guide to Vanishing Without Trace. In that, he documented how it could be done and explained the methods Filipinos used to get it down to a fine art.
David Potter, chief geologist for Freeport Indonesia, owner of Papua's fabulous Grasberg copper and gold mine, has never believed de Guzman took his own life. Brought in to make an independent assessment of the mine, it took the former Vietnam veteran only a few days to determine there was nothing there.
On the morning of March 19, he was anxiously waiting at Busang for the Filipino's helicopter to arrive so he could confront him about his findings. Six weeks later, on May 3, 1997, Strathcona Mineral Services, a Toronto consulting firm, issued its report on a technical audit of core samples taken from the property. Its startling conclusion: ''The magnitude of tampering with core samples... and the resulting falsification of assay values is of a scale and over a period of time and with a precision that, to our knowledge, is without precedent in the history of mining anywhere in the world.'' |
