New podcast digs into the history of Bre-X Minerals’s claims of gold deep in the Indonesian jungle
On the morning of March 19, 1997, Michael de Guzman, chief geologist at Canadian mining company Bre-X Minerals, boarded a helicopter flight to travel to a remote jungle site in Indonesia. It was a journey he had made many times before, to a place where he had reported finding huge deposits of gold.
But this time, de Guzman never arrived. Twenty minutes into the journey, a rear door on the left-hand side of the helicopter opened and de Guzman plummeted to his death into the dense foliage below.
David Walsh, the mining company’s CEO, announced de Guzman had taken his own life, having been diagnosed with hepatitis B and exhausted from fighting recurring malaria. Ten years later, Canadian journalist Suzanne Wilton was sent by the Calgary Herald to investigate de Guzman’s death.
“I was sent halfway around the world… This story has haunted me ever since,” she said. Now, she is back on the case for a new podcast series, The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam, digging deeper into what happened before the fateful helicopter trip.
For the rest of this article: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/bre-x-minerals-gold-rush-podcast-1.7218496