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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (25978)	1/12/1999 6:25:00 AM
From: long-gone	Respond to of 116898

I think we all missed this one, but it is really big if people will ever again be willing to invest in gold mining. Perhaps the sub-title should be "Never another BRE-X".: Wednesday January 6 12:09 AM ET Canadian Police To Beef Up Investigations Of Firms By Paul Simao TORONTO (Reuters) - Canadian police vowed Tuesday to beef up investigations of suspicious companies in a bid to counter Canada's growing reputation as a haven for sophisticated white-collar criminals. Canada is considered a soft touch for white-collar criminals because of lax regulations governing financial institutions and the county's proximity to the prized U.S. market. Financial circles blasted Canada last year after it was revealed that YBM Magnex International Inc., a U.S-based magnet and bicycle company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, was a front for an elaborate global money laundering operation tied to Russian organized crime. The TSE, Canada's premier stock exchange, also ended up with mud in its britches in 1997 after the massive Bre-X gold discovery in Indonesia proved to be a fraud, wiping out billions and spawning a litany of lawsuits. Calgary-based Bre-X Minerals Ltd. had been listed on the TSE with relative ease and lightning-like speed. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which is continuing to investigate the Bre-X affair, said Canada had been fighting a rearguard action against white-collar criminals since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. ''They are well-educated, extremely wealthy and very successful in infiltrating many companies and other areas of Canadian society,'' RCMP inspector Ben Soave told reporters following a press conference. The Mounties added 33 investigators Tuesday to a special inter-agency crime unit in Toronto, Canada's largest city, in an attempt to slam the brakes on the blossoming white-collar crime trade. Canadian companies and consumers lose anywhere from C$3 to C$20 billion each year through investor fraud, manipulation of stock and commodities markets and other scams, according to police estimates. Canada's white-collar problem, however, contains a worrying foreign dimension. Criminals sometimes use Canada as a staging ground for sophisticated infiltration of foreign companies and institutions, particularly those in the United States. Rooting out problem foreign companies, including those north of the U.S-Canada border, is a growing business on New York's Wall Street where some former KGB, CIA and FBI operatives have exchanged cloak and daggers for pinstripes and laptops. U.S.-based rating agency Standard & Poor's Corp., for example, sometimes employs private investigators to help with background checks when it rates a company's securities. ''S&P has used them in the past on rare occasions for background checks on senior management,'' Richard Gugliada, a managing director at the rating agency, recently told Reuters. Aware of the growing attention focused on Canadian companies, Soave said the RCMP would not flinch at investigating the TSE and other prestigious financial institutions. ''We are enhancing old contacts and we're establishing new ones,'' he said. ''If we're doing an investigation where we feel it involves the TSE, then we will approach them.'' ($1-$1.51 Canadian) rh