The Northern Miner Volume 83 Number
35 October 27, 1997
EDITORIAL -- Book refutes one-man salting theory --
The Bre-X scam, Part II
With two Bre-X books already in the bookstores, who needs a
third? We think Bre-X shareholders do, or we would never have
taken on the task of writing a technically oriented account of what
went on at the Busang project operated by Bre-X Minerals in the
jungles of Kalimantan.
The two books already available do not answer the question that puzzles
investors to this day: How did Bre-X's technical team manage to fool the
world for so long? After all, most salting scams are crudely executed,
short-lived, and easily detected because of the wildly erratic assay
results.
The other books would have us believe that Busang really was as hokey
as all the rest.
We are told that chief geologist Michael de Guzman trotted in and out of
a local store and bought placer gold from a Dayak villager on a regular
basis, which his trusted sidekick Cesar Puspos then threw into opened
sample bags on top of a pool table at a warehouse/office in Samarinda.
All this makes for colorful copy, but something doesn't quite add up. The
mining world was not deceived by amateurish antics. Having been fooled
once, it is impossible for us to buy the notion that Busang was a
one-man salting scam that began and ended in the Dayak equivalent of a
7-Eleven convenience store. Rather, we have the sneaking suspicion that
this is what some people involved in the project want the world to
believe.
Bre-X: Gold Today, Gone Tomorrow, published by The Northern
Miner, shows that the salting swindle was organized more professionally
than anyone dreamed possible. It shows that the initial salting attempt by
de Guzman and Puspos was so badly executed that an experienced
professional was brought on board in late 1993 to help the fumbling
incompetents get things right (or wrong, as the case may be).
In early 1994, as a new round of drilling started, the unsavory character
with the dubious technical skills was put to work doing "experiments" to
improve the reproducability of the wildly erratic assay results. And this
work, designed to smooth out the telltale signs of salting, was not done
on top of a pool table in Samarinda; it was carried out at a laboratory
built on site, which included everything needed to prepare samples for
assaying and to perform the actual assays.
Bre-X shareholders unwittingly paid to build and operate the lab, which
then housed a number of individuals whose sole task was to deceive
them and the mining world by finding ways to generate remarkably
consistent results that reflected the underlying geology. In a nutshell, it
was this scientific approach to salting that enabled Busang to become the
gold swindle that fooled the world. Busang was not an exploration
project; it was an "ounce factory" that operated so smoothly and
professionally that everyone believed the goods rolling off the assembly
lines were the real thing.
Unlike previous salting swindles, which were haphazard and hokey at
best, Busang was truly "without precedent" in terms of the precision with
which it was perpetrated. It was not, as the other books would have us
believe, entirely the doing of one dead guy. We are told that the
much-married mastermind picked up a few million dollars for his efforts,
only to turn around and jump from a helicopter because he could not live
with the heartbreak of hepatitis B. We are told that the owners and
managers of Busang had no idea what was going on at their ounce
factory, because they were busy operating a boiler room or sitting on a
Caribbean beach.
Something is rotten, and it ain't in Denmark.
Bre-X: Gold Today, Gone Tomorrow does not pull any punches. It is
the book John Felderhof and David Walsh do not want the public to
read. |
