Billion Dollar Gold Scam: A New Podcast Looks Into The Mysterious Death Of A Geologist Hired To The Mining Industry
- Posted on May 19, 2024
- News
- By Arijit Dutta
- 402 Views
A new podcast reinvestigates the death of geologist Michael de Guzman and the billion-dollar Bre-X gold mining fraud in Indonesia, raising doubts he committed suicide.

A podcast series is launched, exploring one of the biggest corporate fraud cases that took place recently - the gold mine scandal by Bre-X which caused a stir in the mining world back in the late 1990s.
In 1993, a small Canadian company named Bre-X Minerals said that a gold deposit with the largest size was discovered them in a jungle area in Borneo, Indonesia. Over the years and with the constant warnings of a rich gold mine ahead, investors kept on coming, and at the end of 1997, Bre-X's evaluation rose to a huge $6 billion.
It turned out to be a farce, however. In the first place, there was no gold, and the samples of the rock had been tampered with by adding a tiny amount of gold dust to make the investors believe. However, the scam was discovered towards the end of 1997 when the larger mining company brought in to mine the deposit and could not find any gold.
The scandal revolved around the main geologist of the Bre-X, who was Michael de Guzman, who had supported the gold deposit and pinpointed where to drill according to a "dream. " When the fraud was finally unveiled in March 1997, de Guzman died in a mysterious accident after he fell from a helicopter on the way to the mine.
The coroner found that the death was a suicide, but the BBC’s new podcast may be casting a shadow of doubt on the official version of the narrative. The clues provided, tell a story of what possibly happened to De Guzman, such as getting killed or even faking his death and still being alive until now.
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There are six episodes to the series based on the new interviews and evidence collected by journalist Suzanne Wilton who as a journalist has been haunted by the case for years. Although the billion-dollar gold scam planners were never truly punished for their misdeeds, the podcast aspires to eventually reveal the truth behind de Guzman’s disappearance and whether he met an untimely death or if he was a part of the plan to commit the greatest corporate crime in history.