Bre-X Salted A $6B Gold Mine That Never Existed

In 1997, Bre-X Minerals was a tiny Canadian penny stock sitting on what they called the largest gold deposit ever discovered: 200 million ounces buried in the Indonesian jungle. The stock exploded from pennies to C$280. A $6 billion market cap. Pension funds piled in. Indonesia's president wanted a cut.

There was just one problem. The gold did not exist.

Chief geologist Michael de Guzman had been salting the core samples for years, shaving flakes off his own wedding ring and mixing in panned gold from a local river. When their partner Freeport-McMoRan sent independent investigators to verify the deposit in March 1997, de Guzman fell four thousand feet from a helicopter on the way to meet them. The independent assays came back negligible. Six billion dollars vaporized in a week.

That's what the ledger shows.

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