Fleecing the Lamb reports on the official response in 1981: "Des Harrison, the VSE's new vice-president of listings, was asked at a prss conference why trading hadn't been halted during the review period instead of being briefly halted whenever the stock reacted to rumours about the review. He replied: 'As far as the exchange is concerned, all of the available information is available to everyone. And there's no doubt in our minds that everyone knows about the uncertainty; in this instance, the drill results. Therefore, we feel we should continue to provide a market for the shares'."
Cruise and Griffiths have written that: "New Cinch shares continued to trade on the strength of rumours until December 11, 1981 when the company formally announced that Chem-Tec's November 1980 assays had indeed been contaminated."
New Cinch stock ground to a low of $0.20 in 1981 and company management alleged that they themselves were victims -- and that Holes #29 and #31 were the product of mineral tampering (or "salting") by an unknown party or parties. But this explanation was inconsistent with the fact that all of the company's drilling results -- and not just those obtained in late 1980 for Holes #29 and #31 -- had failed to be duplicated by outside, legitimate, assayers. Sample materials from the earliest drill holes were re-assayed and turned up negligible gold/silver content. (The evidence in the case pointed more to a patiently executed, long-term, scheme of assay report falsification than it did to a, relatively recent, drill-core "salting" job.)
"At this point," say the Fleecing the Lamb writers, "the New Cinch story turns from a stock swindle to something considerably more. On November 14, 1982, Michael Opp was found murdered in his Phoenix, Arizona, apartment. It was a cool and professional execution: the killer had kicked in Opp's door, shot him once in the head and disappeared into the night. A Phoenix resident, Hoyt Trujillo, was subsequently charged and acquitted. The prosecutor maintained that the murders involved a dispute over a small drug sale and a $25 television set. Opp's father found an eighteen-page letter, allegedly written by his son, detailing his knowledge of the New Cinch affair. Michael Opp's letter, really a confession of a failed life, describes his homosexual tendencies, his criminal record and various drug binges. In the letter, young Opp claimed that he was an employee of Chem-Tec, the firm that had done the first assay, and lived in the home of the firm's owner, Robert Simon.
Opp further claimed that Simon had bought Chem-Tec with money advanced by Applegath and Vance White. Michael Opp's parents said that their son had expressed fear for his life: 'He could be killed over the salting of the Orogrande assay. He knew the assays were being salted by someone higher up'."
And the beat goes on…"
For more on this article, "New Cinch: A Timeless History Lesson", and other Canadian stock market news and culture items, visit the howenow web-site @ imagen.net |
