The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
With its wood carvings, objets d’art and pool surrounded by palm trees, it was hard to imagine a more luxurious hotel than the Shangri-La in Jakarta. When I knocked on the door of Suite 1234, a gruff John Felderhof greeted me. It was Feb. 28, 1997, and I was on assignment for The Globe and Mail. What neither of us knew was that this would be the last interview the controversial vice-president of exploration for Bre-X Minerals Ltd. would give before the whole Bre-X fable unravelled.
Bre-X had grown from a Calgary-based penny gold stock to a $6-billion company based on its claim to have discovered one of the world’s largest gold finds in the jungles of Busang, Borneo. The story was so compelling and well-known that I was frequently stopped in the street by people who recognized me eagerly asking whether I thought the estimates would continue to grow.
It was hard to imagine they could. On a conference call a few weeks earlier, Felderhof had famously suggested the find could be as much as 200 million ounces, with a value of $70-billion (U.S.), then the equivalent to the GDP of the Philippines. Regulators were looking into the claim.
Felderhof was born in Holland but grew up in Nova Scotia, and was an old-fashioned explorer with a major discovery to his credit. But the Bre-X phenomenon was increasingly looking too good to be true. When mining reporter Allan Robinson and I revealed in a story that the Indonesian government had cancelled Bre-X’s exploration permit–something the company had not revealed–the stock lost $510-million in a single day.
“Your paper is anti-Bre-X,” Felderhof said in our interview, after insisting that, while I could take photos of him, I would not be allowed to record the interview.
I asked Felderhof why he had sold $84-million worth of stock when it sent such a negative message to the market. “To my knowledge,” he replied primly, “I have never in my life broken the rules and regulations of a stock exchange. As a director, I have tremendous responsibility to shareholders.” As for the stunning 200-million-ounce estimate, “I was not trying to promote the stock.” That expression of modesty, however, was followed by the claim that Busang “was the find of the century.”
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/30-years-suicide-and-the-gold-find-of-the-century/article19291769/#dashboard/follows/