Hi Walter,
They said fatty didn't know anything.....LOL.
CALGARY -(Dow Jones)- Bre-X Minerals Ltd. Tuesday said an investigation into the massive fraud at its Busang gold-mine project revealed that Michael de Guzman, the chief company geologist who plunged to his death from a helicopter in March, ordered the salting of mine samples and killed himself to avoid exposure.
The report also concluded that de Guzman began tampering with field samples at the Busang site in Indonesia in December 1993 to prevent its closure and continued until days before de Guzman's suicide.
The role of John B. Felderhof, Bre-X's former top geologist and vice chairman, in the fraud "is still an open question and judgment on him must be reserved until the appropriate additional investigation has been completed," the report said. Felderhof, who made tens of millions of dollars selling Bre-X shares, has asserted that he wasn't aware of any rock-sample tampering.
The report also found no evidence suggesting that David Walsh, president and chief executive of Bre-X, was aware of or participated in the fraud.
Bre-X said it received the information as part of an interim report by Forensic Investigative Associates Inc., a company retained in April by Price Waterhouse to investigate how, where, when and why the salting of Bre-X samples from Busang occurred, and who was responsible for it or had knowledge of it.
Bre-X, based in Calgary, Alberta, filed for bankruptcy-court protection from creditors in May after outside consultants determined that the company's supposed giant gold discovery in Indonesia was an illusion caused by someone adding gold to Bre-X's rock samples. Shares of Bre-X, which once gave the company a market value in the billions of dollars, are now worthless.
The Busang bubble burst March 26, a week after de Guzman's death, when Bre-X and Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., a New Orleans mining company that had entered into a joint-vetnure agreement with Bre-X to develop the Busang mine, announced that due-dilligence testing by Freeport found much less gold than de Guzman's team had estimated.
De Guzman's death on March 19 has been called a suicide by Indonesian police, who say they found a note in his bag in which the 41-year-old geologist wrote that he could no longer bear a multitude of illnesses.
In the 430-page report, dated Oct. 3, Forensic Investigative Associates said that in late 1993, when Bre-X was about to stop drilling at the Busang site after two holes proved barren, de Guzman instructed Cesar Puspos, one of Bre-X's Filipino geologists, "to salt samples for the two subsequent holes - BRH 3 and BRH 4. It is our belief that Cesar Puspos carried out de Guzman's instructions."
The report concluded that de Guzman and Puspos recruited other Busang employees to the fraudulent scheme to further the tampering.
The company said its records indicate de Guzman and Puspos made $4.6 million and $2.2 million, respectively, from the salting scheme through exercising options and subsequent disposition of Bre-X shares.
The report said shavings of a manmade copper-gold alloy were found to have been used as a salting agent in the upper portion of BRH 3 and alluvial gold was found in the lower portions of BRH 3 and in BRH 4.
The report also said de Guzman, with Puspos's help, fraudulently removed $30,000 to $40,000 from Bre-X.
Bre-X said the report concluded that "criminal offences have been committed in relation to Bre-X and members of the public in Canada and elsewhere," and recommended that "a detailed examination be conducted of all Bre-X financial, operational, and communications records to prepare a chronology on the whereabouts of the principal parties involved in the core handling process from October of 1993 to March of 1997."
Bre-X said Forensic Investigative Associates interviewed more than 150 witnesses, and gathered more than 3,000 pages of documents.
GOLDIGER. |
