It was 15 years ago when the fever dreams of a huge gold mine in Borneo crashed in ruins, losing investors billions of dollars. The company Bre-X Minerals Ltd. collapsed when the ore samples on which its entire investment relied were discovered to be fraudulent.
I was just starting out here on About.com (known as miningco.com at the time), and it was a challenge and delight to track down details and write them up. Since then, most of the links I used have disappeared, so my article "The Bre-X Gold Scandal" is a time capsule from those days.
But just last year, someone told me about seeing the master culprit behind the scam walking around Canada recently, rather than dead by suicide as everyone assumed in 1997. This is common knowledge among friends, I was told. How about that?
Comments
Which “major culprit”?
Felderhof?
Walsh?
or Guzman?
I’ve been updating the article over the years, so you can read about it there.
I’m sure I’ve read a quote by Mark Twain (who was present during the California gold rush), something like: ‘The most important thing is not that you have gold in your mine, but that you are able to convince someone else that you have gold in your mine.’