-- Posted Wednesday, 29 August 2007 | Digg This Article
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Appended is a Reuters story with plenty of cynical posing for you. It quotes Barrick Gold CEO Greg Wilkins as complaining that "the Bank of England tried to put the gold mining industry out of business back in 1999," which is when the central bank sold hundreds of tonnes of its gold reserves at auctions designed to get the lowest possible price.
Wilkins neglects to mention that while the Bank of England was selling its gold, Barrick was borrowing hundreds of tonnes of central bank gold and selling them short into the market, assured that the company need not repay the gold for 15 years or more, if ever. (That is, the central bank gold loaned to Barrick was more of a gift than a loan -- provided that Barrick used the gift to do exactly what its CEO now condemns the Bank of England for doing, destroying the gold mining industry.)
In shorting gold Barrick even proclaimed, in a filing in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, that it was the very agent of central banks like the Bank of England:
http://www.lemetropolecafe.com/img2003/memoformotiontodis.pdf
This shorting of gold, engineered by the central banks and accomplished in large part through their agent Barrick, enabled that company to acquire two venerable gold mining companies, Homestake Mining and Placer Dome Gold, on the cheap amid depressed gold prices, in anticipation of the gradual unwinding of the gold carry trade.
So Barrick is denouncing a central bank?
Barrick is a crucial part of central banking -- the company said so itself, even if it doesn't want the investment world to remember.
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
* * *
Barrick Gold Chief
Sees No Slowdown
in U.S. Demand
From Reuters
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUKN2827949720070828?rpc=44
-- Posted Wednesday, 29 August 2007 | Digg This Article
