A gold find that was just too good to be true
When Canadian mining concern Bre-X Minerals announced in 1993 that it had found a massive gold deposit in the jungles of Borneo, it sounded too good to be true.
It was. The gold deposits, supposedly worth a staggering US$24 billion, never existed.
The weekend's revelations by the 'widow' of a key player in the hoax - geologist Michael de Guzman, who is said to have faked his death - has reawakened interest in the spectacular fraud.
An independent report into the scam concluded in 1997 that the gold find at remote Busang was a hoax 'without precedent in the history of mining'. It said the core samples on which the claims were based had been tampered with.
Bre-X chairman David Walsh, the maverick mining executive who was said to have gambled his last C$10,000 ($64,000) on finding Busang, said at the time that the company was devastated.
Suspicion over his role in the scam followed him to an early grave. Walsh died of an aneurysm in the Bahamas in 1998, aged 52.
He left behind just US$37,500 in assets - despite having cashed out Bre-X shares for C$13 million as their prices soared on the basis of the Busang bonanza.
One of those supposedly at the heart of the hoax was geologist de Guzman, said to have faked ore samples. He apparently committed suicide - by leaping from a helicopter over the Indonesian jungle just before the hoax was revealed. A body, partly consumed by animals, was identified by Indonesian police as de Guzman's, yet suspicion swirled that he had faked his death.
Rumours were fuelled by the Indonesian government's role in the Busang project. Then-president Suharto stitched up a deal in which Bre-X would take a 45 per cent stake in the mine, the Indonesian government 10 per cent, and US partner Freeport 15 per cent. The remaining 30 per cent went to a private Indonesian consortium led by businessman Mohammad 'Bob' Hasan, a confidant of Suharto.
Claims by de Guzman's wife, Genie, that her husband met Suharto and Hasan before the exposure of the fraud will only spur the speculation about the former government's role in the debacle.
