On the morning of March 19, 1997, Michael de Guzman, a geoprospector from the Canadian mining company Bre-X, was flying in a helicopter to a remote jungle in Indonesia, where he said he had found a large amount of gold.
After 20 minutes of flight, de Guzman suddenly opened the helicopter hatch and jumped from a height of more than 240 meters......
His body was found a few days later, and the company pronounced him a suicide. Judging from the several suicide notes left by de Guzman, he suffered from repeated malaria attacks and was diagnosed with hepatitis B, and he must have been suffering from the disease before he died to seek relief.
But in fact, his death was involved in the largest gold mine fraud of all time......
(Michael de Guzman)
It all started in 1989.
At that time, David Walsh, the owner of a Canadian mining company, founded a new subsidiary of the company, Bre-X.
Bre-X's main business is diamond exploration in Canada's Northwest Territories, and Walsh hopes to make a fortune from it, but after several years of tossing and turning, nothing has been discovered. Seeing that the company wanted to be yellow, he hurriedly changed his strategy and shifted his development focus to foreign gold exploration.
（Bre-X公司的老板David Walsh）
To this end, he specially recruited John Felderhof, a Dutch geologist who discovered the largest gold mine in Papua New Guinea and is well-known in the industry.
At Felderhof's suggestion, in 1993, Walsh set his sights on an area called Busang in eastern Kalimantan, Indonesia, and bought a plot of land in the jungle nearby.
In the 90s of the 20th century, Indonesia was once seen as an opportunity for gold diggers due to its rich natural mineral resources. The remote bush of Busan is also believed by Felderhof and Walsh to be buried in a gold mine.
Felderhof then enlisted the help of a friend of his, fellow geologist de Guzman.
(1.5.johnJohn Felderhof)
Born in the Philippines in 1956, de Guzman is a well-worked but flamboyant man who has three or four wives in different Asian countries and enjoys singing, drinking, and strip clubs.
When de Guzman joined, the trio worked together to find gold in Boussan, but it didn't go well at first......
The Indonesian government's exploration licence expired on 18 December 1993, and they had to establish the existence of gold before then, but two holes were drilled to nothing.
Seeing the dead line approaching, de Guzman suddenly said that he had dreamed of the exact location of the gold mine.
The team followed his words and drilled a third hole, which did not know that the gold was found, and then more was discovered when the fourth hole was drilled.
(Bre-X宣布在布桑找到黄金)
In the years that followed, exploration continued and new discoveries were made.
According to a report submitted by Bre-X, the estimate of the Boussan gold reserves has been doubling from 56 tonnes to 850 tonnes in 1995, and by 1997 Felderhof had bluntly stated that the final estimate could exceed 5,669 tonnes.
What is the concept? That's almost four times the largest known gold deposit in the world.
After the news spread, the "Busan Gold Mine" doubled in value, and was hailed by the media and banks as "the richest gold mine of all time" and "the greatest discovery".
Investors flocked to the plate, J.P. Morgan issued a public statement expressing support for the "Busan Gold Mine", Lehman Brothers praised it as "the gold discovery of the century", and a number of well-known companies, including Fidelity Investment Group of the United States, took shares one after another, and many ordinary people also wanted a piece of the pie and invested hundreds of thousands of savings to buy Bre-X shares.
As a result, Bre-X's share price has soared from less than 0.3 Canadian dollars to 280 Canadian dollars (about 1486 yuan) in just two years, and the company's market value has also reached 6 billion Canadian dollars (about 31.8 billion yuan).
Walsh, Felderhof, and de Guzman became multimillionaires in one fell swoop. De Guzman was particularly intoxicated by his sudden fame, often running to strip clubs to show off his legend.
But he didn't wait long for him to be happy, in 1997, the East Window Incident, the "Busan Gold Mine" ushered in a shocking reversal, and the so-called Tianliang Gold was just a scam......
(Schematic diagram)
Speaking of which, an American company called Freeport-McMoRan has to be mentioned.
In 1996, Bre-X was at odds with the Indonesian government. Presumably, it was the interests of Indonesia's eyered gold mine that revoked Bre-X's mining rights in Busan on the grounds of "irregular mining", forcing them to hand over part of the proceeds. At the same time, many miners followed the turmoil and staged a battle for interests.
In early 1997, Indonesia's then-President Suharto ordered that Bre-X must share the profits with the Indonesian government and accept help from a larger and more experienced mining company.
And this company, in the end, was named Freeport-McMoRan, although this is an American company, but its founder has some relationship with Suharto, and everyone knows it.
Eventually, Freeport-McMoRan reached an agreement with Bre-X, announcing a $400 million investment in gold-related projects, and in March of the same year, sent geological experts to Busan to conduct a field assessment.
The results were shocking – new samples of the rock were tested and there was no gold at all......
(Michael de Guzman)
When Walsh and Felderhof learned of this, they immediately asked de Guzman, the main discoverer of the gold mine, to explain to the Freeport-McMoRan team in person.
De Guzman was attending a conference in Toronto at the time, and hurried back after hearing it. He first passed through Singapore, met with one of his wives, Genie, and then arrived in Balikpapan, Indonesia.
According to Rudy Vega, a member of the Bre-X exploration team, she went to karaoke with de Guzman that night in Balikpapan and tried to kill herself when she returned to her hotel......
The next morning, on March 19, 1997, as mentioned at the beginning of the article, de Guzman finally flew to Boussan by helicopter, but instead of reaching the gold mine in his mouth, he jumped on the way.
His handwritten suicide note was found on board the helicopter, and it took four days for search and rescue teams to find his body in the jungle, which had been gnawed beyond recognition by a wild boar.
Then, a new report confirmed that there was indeed no gold in Boussan.
It turned out that Bre-X had mixed gold into the rock samples and falsified the results. It's such a simple and naïve trick that fools the world's most senior analysts and company executives.
After the truth was revealed, everyone's golden dreams were shattered. Bre-X's previous $6 billion valuation was wiped out, and the defrauded investors were left in despair, with thousands losing large sums of money.
Infuriatingly, no one paid the price, neither Walsh, nor Felderhof, nor de Guzman......
Both Walsh and Felderhof said they were unaware, with the former dying of illness in 1998 and the latter dying in 2019 without being charged for reasons such as "not having sufficient evidence to convict."
Both of them cashed out a large number of shares in advance, and it is estimated that they enjoyed it before they died.
(Gold mining ceased in 1997)
As for de Guzman, many people think that he has already died for his crimes, but many people suspect that he is not dead at all.
Because there are still a lot of doubts in him......
For example, the body that was found was hastily cremated before fingerprints and DNA could be identified, and a forensic expert once said that based on the initial description of the body, he should have been dead for more than four days.
Is it possible that it wasn't de Guzman at all? He didn't actually get on the helicopter, but found a corpse to be his scapegoat?
Thinking back to the days before his death, there were some inconsistencies.
In the past, de Guzman flew directly from Balikpapan to Busan, but on the 19th, he stopped in Samarinda before heading to Busan, and even the pilot who flew the helicopter that day was different from usual, and seemed to be secretly carrying out some ulterior plan.
Moreover, his suicide note is also very strange, not only misspelling his wife's name, but also mentioning his illness, which no one around has ever heard of.
This is not excessive speculation, and even de Guzman's family is suspicious. His relative, Suzanne Felderhof, expressed disbelief that the suicide note was written by him, while his wife insisted that her husband was certainly alive.
But whether it is life or death, no one can give proof. De Guzman may indeed be gone, or he may be incognito, living in luxury somewhere in the world with the huge fortune he has swindled.
I am afraid that the truth will never be known, and everything related to the gold mine scam has been taken to the grave with the "death" of the three "masterminds......