The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam: 7. Blame

Summary

World Of Secrets: The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam – Episode 7: Blame

Release Date: April 7, 2025

---

Introduction

In the seventh episode of BBC’s investigative podcast World Of Secrets, host Suzanne Wilton delves deeper into the infamous Bre-X gold scam—a monumental fraud that captivated the global financial markets in the mid-1990s. Titled "Blame," this episode scrutinizes the aftermath of the scam, the legal battles that ensued, and the lingering questions about accountability and culpability.

---

The Unraveling of Bre-X

The Bre-X Minerals scandal erupted in 1995 when the Canadian mining company announced the discovery of a vast gold deposit in Busang, Indonesia. This revelation sent Bre-X’s stock soaring, attracting investors eager to stake their claims in what was touted as the biggest gold discovery in history. However, the dream soured rapidly as inconsistencies emerged, leading to catastrophic financial fallout.

Key Event: Report by Graeme Farquharson and Henrik Thalenhorst

The report by Graeme Farquharson and Henrik Thalenhorst significantly damaged Bre-X’s credibility. As Suzanne explains, “Farquharson and Thalenhorst's devastating report hit BRE X hard. John Felderhoff, Brex's chief geologist, was fired and the rest of the company Execs quit” (03:00).

---

The Legal Battles and David Walsh’s Demise

David Walsh, Bre-X’s CEO, steadfastly proclaimed his innocence amid mounting evidence of fraud. Attempts to deflect the scrutiny saw Walsh and his wife relocating to Nassau, Bahamas, only to face violent confrontations that ended with Walsh’s sudden collapse and subsequent death from a stroke on June 4, 1998 (05:12).

Notable Quote:

“The fallout from Brex ruined many lives and inflicted unprecedented damage on the mining industry and financial markets in both Indonesia and Canada.” – Suzanne Wilton (03:00)

---

John Felderhoff’s Trial and Defense

John Felderhoff, the disgraced chief geologist, became the focal point of investor anger and suspicion. Charged with insider trading and issuing false press releases, Felderhoff vehemently denied involvement in the tampering of gold samples. His defense was robust, highlighted by a dramatic demonstration using sugar grains to illustrate the minimal amount of gold required to inflate the deposit figures.

Notable Quote:

“If you believe that sugar is gold, that's the amount of gold you need to find in this big box to have the fabulously successful gold project that Bre X was going to be.” – John Felderhoff (11:07)

Despite the compelling defense, Felderhoff faced significant personal and professional setbacks. Ultimately, in July 2007, Judge Peter Rin acquitted Felderhoff, declaring him not guilty on all charges (15:31). This verdict left many investors devastated, as it offered no closure or accountability for the billions lost.

Notable Quote:

“I knew that the case itself would have real risks attached.” – John Felderhoff (08:17)

---

Aftermath and Lingering Questions

The acquittal did not end the speculation around Bre-X’s fraudulent activities. Suzanne Felderhoff, John’s cousin, shared the personal toll of the scandal, highlighting the stigma attached to the Felderhoff name and the emotional burden borne by those connected to the case (16:31).

Jeannie de Guzman’s Testimony: Jeannie de Guzman, wife of Michael de Guzman—the chief architect behind the Bre-X fraud—came forward to clear her husband’s name, insisting that the true perpetrators were his subordinates, not de Guzman himself (19:20). She emphasized, “Mike was only a field manager for projects. It was his subordinates that played the game.”

Insights from Experts and Witnesses

Geologists and former colleagues provided critical insights into the operational anomalies that pointed toward systematic fraud:

• Mansur Geiger, an Australian geologist, recounted suspicious activities surrounding sample handling, such as mysterious delays and disappearances of core samples (20:42).
• Dave Potter, Freeport’s chief geologist, highlighted the possibility of “salting”—the deliberate addition of trace amounts of gold to samples—to deceive investors (22:07).

Notable Quote:

“They tried it once and it worked and they went, holy smokes, look at the stock price. And we got options at a penny a share. Keep going, boys, this is going to work. And then they, they did, they kept going.” – Dave Potter (28:04)

---

The Perfect Crime and Unanswered Questions

Despite extensive investigations, the Bre-X scam remains unsolved, earning the moniker "the perfect crime." With John Felderhoff’s death in 2019, the trail of accountability grows colder, leaving investors and families without justice. However, the episode hints at unresolved aspects, particularly the mysterious death of Michael de Guzman, whose helicopter crash in 1997 has spawned numerous conspiracy theories.

Looking Ahead: Suzanne Wilton teases the next episode, which will explore the circumstances surrounding de Guzman’s death, suggesting that the official narrative may not hold all the answers (33:26).

---

Conclusion

Episode 7: Blame of World Of Secrets meticulously unpacks the complexities of the Bre-X gold scam, highlighting personal tragedies, legal struggles, and the elusive quest for truth in the aftermath of corporate fraud. By weaving firsthand accounts with expert analyses, the episode provides a comprehensive look into one of the most audacious financial scams in history, leaving listeners pondering the true extent of deception and the shadows it casts on all involved.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Suzanne Wilton (03:00):

  “The fallout from Brex ruined many lives and inflicted unprecedented damage on the mining industry and financial markets in both Indonesia and Canada.”

• John Felderhoff (11:07):

  “If you believe that sugar is gold, that's the amount of gold you need to find in this big box to have the fabulously successful gold project that Bre X was going to be.”

• John Felderhoff (08:17):

  “I knew that the case itself would have real risks attached.”

• Suzanne Felderhoff (16:31):

  “This whole story totally ate in my life.”

• Jeannie de Guzman (19:20):

  “Mike was only a field manager for projects. It was his subordinates that played the game.”

• Dave Potter (28:04):

  “They tried it once and it worked and they went, holy smokes, look at the stock price. And we got options at a penny a share. Keep going, boys, this is going to work. And then they, they did, they kept going.”

---

Next Episode Teaser

As the saga of the Bre-X scandal continues, the next episode promises to investigate the mysterious helicopter crash that claimed Michael de Guzman’s life. Can new evidence shed light on his untimely death and potentially expose the remaining secrets of the six billion dollar gold scam?

Stay tuned to World Of Secrets for the continuation of this gripping investigation.

---

Production Credits

The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam is produced by BBC Scotland Productions for the BBC World Service and CBC. Key contributors include:

• Host: Suzanne Wilton
• Lead Producer: Kate Bissell
• Producers: Anna Miles, Mark Rickards
• Story Consultant: Jack Kibble White
• Music and Sound Design: Hannis Brown
• Additional Sound Design and Audio Mix: Joel Cox
• Executive Editors: Heather Kane Darling (CBC), Veronica Simmons, Willow Smith
• Executive Producers: Chris Oak, Cecil Fernandez, Arif Noorani
• Senior Podcast Producer: Ann Dixie
• Podcast Commissioning Editor: John Mennell

---

This detailed summary encapsulates the critical elements of Episode 7: Blame, providing listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the Bre-X gold scam, the ensuing legal battles, and the quest for accountability that remains unresolved decades later.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

[Advertiser]

Spring has officially sprung and we're craving even more sunshine. The solution? A Cheap Caribbean beach vacay Cheap Caribbean is all about finding you the best beach deals for your budget. Check out their semi annual sale and take an extra $200 off site wide vacation packages of four plus nights to your favorite tropical beach destinations. Don't wait. This awesome offer won't last forever. Go to cheapcaribbean.com to start search for paradise and book before April 30th to save big.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Asking the right questions can greatly impact.

[John Felderhoff]

Your future, especially when it comes to your finances.

[Suzanne Wilton]

So if you're looking for a financial advisor you can trust, certified financial planner.

[John Felderhoff]

Professionals are committed to acting in your best interest. That's why it's got to be a CFP. Find your CFP [e-mail].

[Suzanne Wilton]

From the BBC's investigations podcast World of Secrets, here's the seventh episode of our guest season, the.

[Jeannie de Guzman]

$6 billion gold scam from the BBC.

[Suzanne Wilton]

World Service and CBC over to Suzanne Wilton. First, a warning. The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to suicide and death.

[John Felderhoff]

One of the strange things about the Briex story is the amount of heartache that it caused to so many different people. There were times where I thought there was some kind of Bre X curse. I don't believe in the boogeyman and I don't believe in curses as a general matter, but there's something about Bre X that's hard to explain other than hellfire and damnation.

[Suzanne Wilton]

I also don't believe in the boogeyman or curses, but the number of Bre X execs, lawyers, expert witnesses, investigators, and even journalists who've worked on this story and had tragedy befall them during or shortly after is quite unbelievable. I can think of four people I I personally know who either lost their lives or experienced some kind of unrelated tragedy following their involvement with Brie X. Like the investors, we lost everything. My husband was sick for four years. We worked hard for our money. We probably would have had that extra money to pursue more medical help.

[John Felderhoff]

There's stories all around here in Alberta and all around Canada. People taking their lives. They were just so confident that it wasn't a scam. This was their lottery ticket for life.

[Suzanne Wilton]

The fallout from Brex ruined many lives and inflicted unprecedented damage on the mining industry and financial markets in both Indonesia and Canada. I'm Suzanne Wilton from the BBC World Service and CBC. This is the $6 billion gold scam, a story about the lengths people will go to in pursuit of getting rich. This is episode seven. Blame Graeme Farquharson and Henrik Thalenhorst's devastating report hit BRE X hard. John Felderhoff, Brex's chief geologist, was fired and the rest of the company Execs quit. In May 1997, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began their investigation into the scam. Breeks sought bankruptcy protection and nine class action suits were filed against them. The CEO of Brex, David Walsh, continued to profess his innocence. At first, he insisted there had been no fraud. But as the evidence mounted, he claimed, like everyone else, that he'd been taken in by the deception. To escape the fallout in Canada, David and his wife, Jeannette Walsh, moved from Calgary to Nassau in the Bahamas. But not long after they arrived, two masked gunmen burst into their home. They tied Walsh up and threatened to shoot him unless he turned over all his money. Was this just a random attack on an aging but clearly rich Canadian couple or something more an attempt to silence David Walsh? We can't be sure, but what we do know is the incident ended peacefully. But then, three weeks after that break in, David Walsh was rushed to hospital.

[John Felderhoff]

The founder of BRE X Minerals is on life support tonight. David Walsh suffered a stroke at his oceanside vill outside Nassau Sunday morning, just two days after the Bahamas Supreme Court froze all of his assets.

[Mansur Geiger]

Walsh's family is now trying to decide whether to keep him on life support.

[Suzanne Wilton]

David Walsh died on 4 June 1998. His body was left to medical science. There were three men who turned Busang into the biggest gold discovery in the world. Michael de Guzman, David Walsh and John Felderhoff. Now only one of them was left alive. Unsurprisingly, Felderhoff became the main target of all those investor questions. Was he in on the scam? What did he know and when? While rifling through journalist Jennifer Wells Brie X documents, I came across a Royal Canadian Mounted Police polygraph test that he'd taken. The report unequivocally concludes that John Felderhoff is telling the truth when answering the relevant questions that were asked of him. And it further concludes that John Felderhoff was in no way involved in the tampering or salting of of Boussaint core samples. So John Felderhoff passed a lie detector test. Those, you know, are not admissible in court, but certainly may or may not shed some light on what he did or didn't know. Although the Royal Canadian Mounted Police looked into bre X in 1999, they dropped the investigation, stating there was insufficient evidence. They went on to say this was in part because of the international laws protecting witnesses outside of Canada from testifying. They could not be compelled to give evidence. The day before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dropped their case, the Ontario Securities Commission charged John Felderhoff with violating Ontario security laws. There were four counts of insider trading and four of issuing false press releases which allegedly exaggerated the amount of gold. No one else from BRE X's board of directors or anyone associated with the Busang project was indicted. Nonetheless, the investors would have their day in court with the last man standing, John Felderhoff.

[John Felderhoff]

I knew that the case itself would have real risks attached. A national newspaper said that I had become a pariah by agreeing to represent John.

[Suzanne Wilton]

After spending 10 days in the Cayman Islands listening to Felderhoff tell his side of the story, Joe Groja, one of Canada's top securities litigation lawyers, decided to take on the case.

[John Felderhoff]

I had a couple of what I thought to be non serious death threats.

[Suzanne Wilton]

The case centered around the shares that John Felderhoff sold in 1996 for 84 million and whether or not he knew things about Bre X at that time that he should have disclosed to the market. From his home in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. Felderhoff put in a plea of not guilty to all eight charges. At that time, John Felderhoff didn't believe there had been a scam.

[John Felderhoff]

There was an interview that was given where John talked about the possibility there could be as much as 80 million ounces. And that got picked up and got reported, but that was never in an official press release. It was said that he should have known that the numbers they were reporting were inaccurate.

[Suzanne Wilton]

These results were provided to Felderhoff and Breech's execs by Filipino geologists under the management of Michael de Guzman. The core samples would be sent for testing. They would get results, and they would plug them into a computer program called data mining. This data mining program, overseen by de Guzman, used an algorithm to estimate how much gold there could be based on the drill samples. Contrary to what most people might think, the amount of gold needed in a gold sample to give a massive valuation is actually incredibly small.

[John Felderhoff]

We all grow up in this cartoon world where, you know, gold deposits, they're thought to be the size of a grapefruit or the size of a watermelon. And that's not the way it works in real life.

[Suzanne Wilton]

For the defense, it was important to make it crystal clear to the judge that it was more than feasible for the Tampering to have occurred without Felderhoff's knowledge. With a reputation as a bit of a maverick, Grolja decided to use a prop to illustrate how little gold you need to find in a ton of rock to establish a large deposit.

[John Felderhoff]

I brought in a cardboard box that had been a refrigerator box. So imagine a 3ft by 3ft by 6ft. And that box happened to be very close to the weight of a ton of rock from Busang. And I then got a package of Demerara brown sugar, and we sprinkled probably two dozen grains of sugar into little vials. And I actually gave samples out to the reporters at the opening of the case. And I said to the judge, if you believe that sugar is gold, that's the amount of gold you need to find in this big box to have the fabulously successful gold project that Bre X was going to be. And people were astonished.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Although the amount of gold required to make the scam work might have been tiny, those following the trial wanted to know how John Felderhoff as the chief geologist, could have missed so many other red flags.

[John Felderhoff]

With the best all inclusive vacation deals to Mexico and the Caribbean. Booking your getaway with cheap Caribbean vacations means you have more freedom to do your deal. Whether you want to enjoy snorkeling, endless margaritas and more, or simply soak up the sun and sand in a tropical paradise, Cheap Caribbean Vacations has your deal for that. Plan and book the exact getaway you want at exactly the right price for you by using our exclusive budget beach finder. Or find a featured family friendly all inclusive package to dreams, resorts and spas. And do your [e-mail] at Ameca Insurance, we know it's more than just a car or a house. It's the four wheels that get you where you're going and the four walls that welcome you home. When you combine auto and home insurance with Amica will help protect it all. And the more you cover, the more you can save Amica Empathy is our best policy. Asking the right questions can greatly impact your future, especially when it comes to your finances.

[Suzanne Wilton]

So if you're looking for a financial advisor you can trust, certified financial planner.

[John Felderhoff]

Professionals are committed to acting in your best interest. That's why it's gotta be a CFP. Find your CFP professional at letsmakeaplan.org.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Freeport geologist Dave Potter believed John Felderhoff may have missed so many red flags because his focus was elsewhere.

[Dave Potter]

I gotta say something about John right there. I think John actually had A real soft spot in his heart for the Dayak people. And I think if John didn't know, he might have been distracted by his vision for helping those people. I'll give him that potential, although I still think he knew.

[Podcast Host]

Chief geologist is is described by the guys on site as a seagull because he flies in, he shits on everybody, then he flies out again. I know that because I was one once. Not a seagull, that is a chief geologist. I suspect John didn't do quite enough shooting, Roger.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Marjorie Banks also has a theory.

[Podcast Host]

I think Felderhoff was honest, but I think he was blind to a huge scam going on behind his back. Perhaps because of the size of it, maybe the key to it, just the boldness, the sheer audacity of what was being done and the fact that people were a bit naive, a bit innocent, and it slipped through the net.

[Suzanne Wilton]

On July 31, 2007, six years after John Felderhoff's trial began, Judge Peter Rin finally reached his own conclusion on all charges. He found Felderhoff not guilty. It was devastating news for the people who'd lost their relatives, life savings and pensions in the Brex scam. The judge said, I'm satisfied on a balance of probabilities that Felderhoff has proven that he took all reasonable care. In other words, the judge was saying that John Felderhoff was oblivious to the salting scam that was being perpetrated. It was a triumph for his lawyer, Joe Groya.

[John Felderhoff]

Had John lost those charges, he would have been sent to jail for many years and would have had to pay millions of dollars in fines.

[Suzanne Wilton]

It was a landmark victory, but the trial took its toll on Felderhoff. Suzanne Felderhoff, whose father was John Felderhoff's cousin, first learnt about the enormity of Briex and her family's connection to it. While on holiday and I was chatting.

[Suzanne Felderhoff]

With a Canadian fellow tourist and we exchanged our names and she said, oh, my God, what was your last name? Felderhoff. That man ruined so many lives. And then I really realized, wow, what is the impact of the Felderhof name on the Canadians? It totally ate in my life, this whole story.

[Suzanne Wilton]

In the years after the court case, Suzanne visited John several times.

[Suzanne Felderhoff]

I found him in all my visits very, like, heavy. He was, like, constantly contemplating and chewing on the story. What could have happened? I think that must have weighed very heavily on John's mind, being so overwhelmed about the. Yeah, the change of events, the idea that Mike de Guzman was the one who betrayed him in this way was so unbelievable to him that he just couldn't wrap his mind around it.

[Suzanne Wilton]

There were many people who didn't speak at John Felderhoff's trial, but some of them are now willing to talk and tell us how they believe this extraordinary scam was orchestrated. And perhaps more importantly, who was in on it and who wasn't. Michael de Guzman's Indonesian wife, Jeannie, was with him when he was working in Busang. She is still dealing with the repercussions of what happened.

[Jeannie de Guzman]

It's a burden I have to live my life as it is, a modest life. If I look good, I get ridiculed. I have been living my life like that for so many years.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Jeannie says she feels it's time to tell the truth about her husband so she can live out her final years in peace.

[Jeannie de Guzman]

I use a motorbike so that people can see that I am poor. I can actually live well, but I can't stand being ridiculed. Oh, that's the result of tricking people. Her husband is tricking people, lying to people.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Now a pensioner. She wants those who were swindled to know it was not de Guzman who cheated them out of their investments.

[Jeannie de Guzman]

That's why I dare to speak, because the one who invests their money to buy the stocks are all pensioners. They hold a grudge against Mike. Maybe they swear on him this is all because of Mike de Guzman, that we all went poor when it is actually not Mike who made them like that. Mike was only a field manager for projects. It was his subordinates that play the game.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Mike's subordinates, as Jeanne refers to them, were Briex's crew of Filipino geologists. There was Rudy Vega and Jerry Allo, who extracted the samples, and geologists Bobby Ramirez and Cesar Puzpos, who logged the samples and oversaw general operations. Australian geologist Mansur Geiger is known as the real Indiana Jones of Borneo. He's been searching for gold in Indonesia for several years. Like many people, he has opinions about John Felderhoff.

[Mansur Geiger]

It started looking rather odd. They were sending their samples from Busang all the way way to Samarinda to some warehouse where it would seem to disappear for a while and then end up in the lab in Balikpapan, which lab is the same lab I was using. And there I'd find, you know, their samples laid out and looked at my rocks and their rocks and said, well, why aren't I getting such good results? I mean, it's very similar geology very early on amongst us. Real jungle geos of the day, something wasn't smelling all that right now. People have asked me, you know, did John have anything to do with it? Well, as exploration manager, which VP Exploration manager, which I was, if your samples are disappointed, disappearing into some funny little warehouse along the way for a couple of weeks and not getting to the lab, I'd be all over it. Where on earth are the samples? Why the delay?

[Suzanne Wilton]

So if he didn't know, he should have.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Dave Potter, Freeport's chief geologist, also had questions about brex's process.

[Dave Potter]

They would ship it by river to San Marinda and they would put it in a warehouse. Now, the assay lab is right there in San Marino, so it could have went directly to the assay lab, but it went to the warehouse first. And I kind of think that's where they did the salting.

[Suzanne Wilton]

In the previous episode, we heard how Freeport geologist Andrew Neal had spotted that the gold in the breech samples must have come from a stream. This was something Dave Potter and Mansur Giger were able to corroborate for me.

[Mansur Geiger]

There were local gold panners around. They bought a bit of gold and they worked out this very sophisticated system of, you know, salting, what we call the salting of the core. By adding gold into their drill core.

[Dave Potter]

They evidently bought alluvial gold. And the reason they did it like this, they bought alluvial gold from the rivers around the site where they were at because they wanted to make sure that the gold. You can type gold, it's kind of like a fingerprint. And they wanted to make sure that the gold that they typed was similar to the gold that was in that original deposit.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Alluvial gold is the name for the type of gold found in flowing water. Although it would have some of the same properties or fingerprint as gold that might be found in Busang. The scratch marks it gets from being dragged along the riverbed are also a giveaway that it couldn't have come from the ground. Suzanne Felderhoff had her own piece of the jigsaw involving Cesar Puspos, albeit it was an account someone else had given to her.

[Suzanne Felderhoff]

There was this witness who saw Puspos tampering with these bags. He told me that, that he saw that. Well, he was there and they were working in the jungle. And at some point there's this river, and I think on the boat they put these bags and they're shipped off to a laboratory in Samarinda. And just halfway that river somewhere, there was this. And the witness saw that puss pospulse was sort of standing on his bags with something what he described as he had a pen in his hand and made these clicking movements. And he saw that something was added to these bags. That's what I was told. And he said, what are you doing there? And this person then was startled and stopped what he was doing.

[Suzanne Wilton]

It's a rule in mining that at no point during a sample's chain of custody should a bag be opened or have anything added. While I was in Jakarta, I met with Bre X's former finance manager, Bernard Liouddin. He says he also witnessed Cesar Puspos opening sample bags when he visited the drill corps at night that summer.

[John Felderhoff]

In the office I saw actually a bunch of bags containing samples. And they took me to other store where they keep the drilling core. It's a big warehouse near the river.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Were the bags open or closed?

[John Felderhoff]

The sample bag? Oh, I saw there are mixing, blah, blah, blah, you know, organizing, mixing the bag and blah blah blah in the.

[Mansur Geiger]

Night, not during the day.

[Suzanne Wilton]

When asked by a journalist for the Wall street journal in May 1997, Cesar Puzpos said the only reason he opened the bags was to check that none had been broken in transit. He also stated that he had no idea how the samples were spiked. Cesar Puspos was summoned by subpoena to the Manila headquarters of the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation. There he was questioned by four Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Canadians grilled him for four, four hours, mainly about John Felderhoff and whether he knew about the salting. Geologist Dave Potter had his own suspicions on who was in on it and who wasn't.

[Dave Potter]

It was very well planned out and that was the Philippine side of it. So I think it started with a let's just do it once. And then pretty soon they saw how much money was to be made if they kept doing it. Because remember, the stock went from a penny stock to like $286 a share. And a lot of those guys were being paid with stock options. They tried it once and it worked and they went, holy smokes, look at the stock price. And we got options at a penny a share. Keep going, boys, this is going to work. And then they, they did, they kept going. But I don't think there was a huge, you know, syndicate in the background. They really put a lot of effort into making it believable. And that wasn't John doing that. That was the guys out there on the field, de Gooseman and the people in the camp who were taking care of handling the corps and salting them.

[Suzanne Wilton]

If the Filipino geologists were indeed the ones perpetrating the scam, then geologist Roger Marjorie Banks can understand why they might have been motivated to do what they did.

[Podcast Host]

People used quite a lot in Indonesia, geologists from the Philippines, my own company did that too because they were technically very competent guys and also they mixed in well, they blended the local population and I'm sad to say they were cheap. Whereas an Australian geologist or Canadian geologists would probably been doing three weeks on, two weeks off, but the Philippine geologists would be doing more like 12 weeks on and two or three weeks off and didn't cost as much. And of course these guys from the Philippines knew that they were being exploited to some extent. Not knowing any of the blokes that BREX employed, I suspect that many of them felt they were being a little bit exploited with the wages that were being earned being offered and decided to make some money on the side as best they could. And their best was very, very good indeed. Boy, was that some scam.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Cesar Puzbos and the other Filipino geologists all denied salting the core and none of them were ever charged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or the Indonesian authorities in relation to the BRE X scam. We've attempted to contact Cesar Puspos and the other Filipino geologists but have not received any responses. Suzanne Felderhoff is sure that whatever was going on, De Guzman would have known.

[Suzanne Felderhoff]

De Guzman was the guy. He did everything, he was everywhere. He was a control kind of person. So his second right hand man was Caesar Puspos. But he was very much the second guy. He would follow orders from the goose men. So John said it would have been difficult for anybody to do anything without Mike De Guzman knowing about it.

[Suzanne Wilton]

A few years ago, Joe Groya was asked to give a talk at the Prospectors and Developers association conference about the lessons of BRE X. He decided to take his one time client, John Felderhoff along with him.

[John Felderhoff]

We were a little worried because he hadn't been back to Canada for a number of years, so we were not broadcasting the fact that he was there. So he came with some of my colleagues and sat at a table in the corner of the lecture hall and I went up and gave the talk and it seemed to be greeted with some skepticism by some of the people, but it was certainly welcomed by others. So at the end one of the people in the audience said, so where is Mr. Felderhoff? Where's he hiding out? And I thought probably it was the goodest time as any and so I said, well, if you look three tables to your left there you will see John sitting with some of my colleagues. And that caused a bit of a commotion and several people went up and talked to him for quite a long time afterwards. And I think he was grateful that he had this opportunity to, to start to try and get himself back into the geological profession. Now he never really succeeded. John tried for years afterwards to find a job doing what he loved the most, which was exploring for mineral deposits. But unfortunately that could never really come to.

[Suzanne Wilton]

John Felderhoff died in 2019. It was Joe Groja who broke the news to the press. Many lives were ruined by the Breeck scam. Families broken, livelihoods lost, and the not guilty verdict was a bitter disappointment. But with the death of John Felderhoff, there was no one else left to blame. Bre X became known as the perfect crime, a story in which no one faced jail. And that still remains the case some 25 years on. But there are those who believe this story isn't done yet. They say that if you want to know what really happened at you need to look again at Michael de Guzman and his last helicopter ride. Coming up in the next episode of the $6 billion gold scam. The investigation into the death of Michael de Guzman leads me to the report who questions the official narrative. See, the skeptical journalist in me finds that very interesting. Why?

[John Felderhoff]

To say we just want you to.

[Suzanne Wilton]

Accept that Michael is dead because we.

[John Felderhoff]

Accept that he's dead.

[Suzanne Wilton]

The manner of his death doesn't matter to us. I think that goes against human nature and discover evidence which seems to go against everything we've been told.

[John Felderhoff]

The individuals are for one to two weeks. The composition doesn't lie. So I think the body was already dead.

[Suzanne Wilton]

The $6 billion gold scam is produced by BBC Scotland Productions for the BBC World Service and CBC. I'm Suzanne Wilton. Our lead producer is Kate Bissell. Producers Anna Miles, Mark Rickards story consultant Jack Kibble White music and sound design by Hannis Brown. Additional sound design and audio mix by Joel Cox. Executive editor Heather Kane Darling at cbc. Veronica Simmons and Willow Smith are senior producers. Chris Oak is executive producer, Cecil Fernandez is executive producer and Arif Noorani is the director at the BBC World Service. Ann Dixie is senior podcast producer and John Mennell is the podcast commissioning editor. Thanks for listening.

[Advertiser]

Spring has officially sprung and we're craving even more sunshine. The solution? A cheap Caribbean beach vacay. Cheap Caribbean is all about finding you the best beach deals for your budget. Check out their semi annual sale and take an extra $200 up off sitewide vacation packages of four plus nights to your favorite tropical beach destinations. Don't wait. This awesome offer won't last forever. Go to CheapCaribbean.com to start your search for paradise and book before April 30th to save big.