You are here
If Gaddafi had sold all the gold, maybe NATO would have let him stay
Regime's sales don't seem to have knocked the price down any.
* * *
Gaddafi Regime Sold $1 Billion of Gold, Central Bank Says
By Michael Peel, Jack Farchy, and Roula Khalaf
Financial Times, London
Thursday, September 8, 2011
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/85c0912a-da1e-11e0-b199-00144feabdc0.html
Colonel Muammer Gaddafi's embattled Libyan regime resorted to an escalating selloff of the country's gold reserves during its final months, according to the central bank and local gold traders, as it scrambled to survive a rebel uprising, NATO bombing, and international financial sanctions.
Qassim Azzuz, the new central bank governor, said the Gaddafi regime raised more than $1 billion to pay salaries from trading 29 tonnes of gold with local traders in April, with the metal then possibly being taken out of the country for resale.
The selloff -- which the victorious anti-Gaddafi opposition says consumed a fifth of the nation's gold reserves -- highlights the squeeze facing Col Gaddafi as the uprising grew and international sanctions took hold while raising the question of whether he used the money to directly fund his war effort.
... Dispatch continues below ...
Golden Phoenix to Present at Investment Conference at Waldorf
Company Press Release
Thursday, September 1, 2011
The chief executive officer and the communications director of Golden Phoenix Minerals Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: GPXM) will speak at the Rodman & Renshaw Global Investment Conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on Tuesday, September 13.
The CEO, Thomas Klein, and the communications director, Robert Ian, will address the conference from 2:50 to 3:15 p.m. at the hotel. The conference's keynote speakers include former Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Al Gore and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
"At this conference Golden Phoenix will introduce its royalty mining growth strategy to a global investment audience," Klein says. "With rising gold prices, industry consolidation, and central banks becoming net buyers of gold, we believe that the investment demand for emerging and diversified gold producers like Golden Phoenix offers the potential for significant growth."
Golden Phoenix is a U.S. mining company with international exposure to gold, silver, and strategic metals. The company's business model combines project generation and royalty mining that offer the potential for exploration upside with the backing of production and future royalty streams.
For information about the conference, including last-minute room and schedule changes, please visit:
http://www.rodmanandrenshaw.com/conferences?id=164
For the complete press release, please visit:
http://goldenphoenix.us/press-release/golden-phoenix-to-speak-at-rodman-...
In the narrow Old City alleyways across the street from the central bank, jewellery shop owners said on Thursday that while the regime's sales of the precious metal had indeed begun in about April it continued until the successful rebel uprising in Tripoli last month.
Jewellers in Tripoli said the central bank began by offering small 22-carat coins but later marketed 12-kilgram bars costing almost more than half a million dollars each, as its need for cash became more desperate.
Abdulghani Kara, owner of a jewellry shop whose back wall was dominated by a giant rebel flag, said: "A lot of the gold dealers who bought this from the bank are not working now. They know they did something wrong and they are trying to lie low."
Traders said the coins retailing at well under $1,000 and chocolate bar-sized 1-kg slabs had sold well enough, but few people other than Gaddafi ultra-loyalists who had done well financially by the regime had the resources to buy the 12-kg offerings.
The sale became increasingly contentious, with warnings from pro-rebel television stations and from one of Tripoli's main Islamic leaders not to buy the metal.
Unusually for a central bank, Libya held its gold reserves of 144 tonnes inside the country. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, recently ordered his country's gold reserves to be repatriated because of concerns it could be seized.
The Libyan selloff was equivalent to about two weeks of peace-time government spending, according to Central Intelligence Agency estimates, but would have been enough to pay the salaries of the army for much longer.
Farhat Bengdara, the former central bank governor who defected from the regime, said: "Gaddafi sold the gold to finance the troops and I've been told that every week the regime was taking money out of the central bank."
He suggested that the gold sold in April could have been taken to Tunisia by relatives of Col Gaddafi or senior members of the army as a means of getting it out of the country before being sold elsewhere. "They travel to Tunisia, and from Tunisia they would start looking where to sell," he told the Financial Times.
Few Western traders would have been prepared to buy the gold, however. "Right now people are very cautious on their trading partners and wouldn't just go in and buy cheap gold if they didn't know the source of it," said an executive at one large gold refiner.
Tripoli jewellers and their associates -- none of whom admitted to buying any of the gold themselves -- were more ambivalent about the sales, with some saying they believed the regime had genuinely used the money for salaries.
With scores of billions of assets frozen and the oil industry on which Libya depends all but mothballed, the Gaddafi regime had few financial options apart from spending its domestic reserves of foreign exchange and easily tradeable assets such as gold.
Poised over a tub of gold bracelets, necklaces, and lockets ready for melting down, Ali Ghadour, a precious metals craftsman, said the income had helped some Libyans at a time of crisis when official salaries weren't being paid and bank withdrawals were severely limited.
"Buying the gold [provided] support for the government. But on the other hand, the money was used to bring food for the public," he said.
* * *
Join GATA here:
Toronto Resource Investment Conference
Thursday-Friday, September 15-16, 2011
Sheraton Toronto Centre
http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/toronto-resource-investment...
The Silver Summit
Thursday-Friday, October 20-21, 2011
Davenport Hotel, Spokane, Washington
http://cambridgehouse.com/conference-details/the-silver-summit-2011/48
New Orleans Investment Conference
Wednesday-Saturday, October 26-29, 2011
Hilton New Orelans Riverside Hotel
http://www.neworleansconference.com/
Support GATA by purchasing gold and silver commemorative coins:
https://www.amsterdamgold.eu/gata/index.asp?BiD=12
Or by purchasing a colorful GATA T-shirt:
Or a colorful poster of GATA's full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal on January 31, 2009:
http://gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal
Or a video disc of GATA's 2005 Gold Rush 21 conference in the Yukon:
Help keep GATA going
GATA is a civil rights and educational organization based in the United States and tax-exempt under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Its e-mail dispatches are free, and you can subscribe at:
To contribute to GATA, please visit:
Prophecy Platinum Drills 49.5 Meters Grading 1.27 g/t PGM+Au at Yukon Wellgreen Project
Company Press Release
August 22, 2011
Prophecy Platinum Corp. (TSX-V: NKL, OTC-QX: PNIKF, Frankfurt: P94P) announces results from its 2011 drilling program for its first completed hole on the Wellgreen Project in the Yukon Territory, Canada.
Borehole WS11-184 encountered 472.6 meters of mineralization grading 0.43% nickel equivalent from surface to the footwall contact. Within this larger swath of mineralization the hole encountered 49.5 meters of 1.27 grams per ton platinum group metals plus gold, 0.71% nickel, and 0.45% copper (or 1.11% nickel equivalent).
The geology transitioned from blebby disseminated to net-textured to massive sulphide approaching the footwall contact grading 6.3% nickel, 1.7% copper, 2.7 grams per ton platinum, 1.6 grams per ton palladium, 0.17 grams per ton gold, and 3.4 grams per ton silver. The drilling zones and results are tabulated here, with more information:
http://www.prophecyplat.com/news_2011_aug22_prophecy_platinum_wellgreen_...
