Report Says Bre-X Geologist Responsible for Gold Swindle

TORONTO — Investigators hired by Canada’s Bre-X Minerals Ltd. said Tuesday that its dead chief geologist, Michael de Guzman, orchestrated the world’s biggest gold swindle deep in the jungles of Indonesia.

The investigators’ report released Tuesday said de Guzman, who died of an apparent suicide shortly before the fraud was exposed, led a small group of Bre-X employees who salted samples from the Busang site over a four-year period.

Bre-X hired Forensic Investigative Associates Inc. to probe the mining scandal last spring when the stock market darling was reduced to worthless paper after Busang was found to be a scam.

Bre-X released a three-page summary of the agency’s 430-page interim report Tuesday.

The FIA report absolved Chief Executive David Walsh and several other key players in the Busang saga of any wrongdoing. But it said exploration chief John Felderhof’s role in the affair “is still an open question.”

FIA said it had “reasonable and probable grounds” to believe that de Guzman and employee Cesar Puspos conspired with others “to defraud Bre-X and the public in Canada and elsewhere through the deceitful salting scheme.”