Gold funds shining above the rest

5:14p ET Friday, May 11, 2001

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

GATA Chairman Bill Murphy reports that, contrary to a strangely
negative story distributed today by www.TheMiningWeb.com,the
GATA African Gold Summit in Durban, South Africa, was quot;a huge
successquot; and could not have gone better.

South Africa has been deluged with publicity about the
conference for two days, particularly on television and radio.
This morning Murphy was interviewed live and at length for
another show on the South African Broadcasting Co. network.
Virtually every radio station in the country carried extensive
reports about the conference as well.

Murphy says we can expect more coverage from other news
organizations that attended the conference and are starting
to show interest in the gold price suppression story.

quot;People here are stunned,quot; Murphy said. But he added that
we should expect more bashing by the anti-gold financial
establishment, along the lines of the one-sided stories
published this week in the Financial Times and the London
Evening Standard, which purported to refute GATA without
giving us even a chance to be quoted.

No matter; this is actually great progress. It shows that
we have left the point where we can be ignored and have
arrived at the point where power has to acknowledge us
and try to discredit us.

National delegations at the Durban conference represented
South Africa, Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Swaziland.

Business was represented by AngloGold, Gold Fields, Harmony
Gold, Durban Roodeport Deep, the South African Chamber of
Commerce, and the South African Chamber of Mines.

Labor was represented by national trade union officials and
officials of the national miners union.

Murphy said he senses that black, Zulu, and Afrikaner opinion
in South Africa is with us, English opinion against us. But
that's not so surprising.

Murphy said he was especially impressed with the delegation
from Ivory Coast, which said it plans to pursue the gold price
suppression issue upon its return home.

I'm sure we'll have more to report about the conference soon.

I must admit that I'm a little disappointed that news
organizations have been so slow to grasp the significance of
GATA's recent discovery of the reference to quot;gold swapsquot; by
the U.S. Exchange Stabilization Fund in the minutes of the
January 31, 1995, meeting of the Federal Reserve's Federal
Open Market Committee. For two years the Fed and the U.S.
Treasury have been denying, in writing, any involvement by
the U.S. government in the gold market. The public record
now contradicts this. That is, we now have proven the
surreptitious manipulation of the gold price that has been
undertaken by the U.S. government, and that is what we're
telling the world about.

I'll append today's story about the Durban conference in
Business Report, the national business newspaper in South
Africa, and a link to the report at www.MiningWeb.com, which
has asked that we not copy its reports whole but rather
direct readers to its web site.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

* * *

Gold antitrust guru seeks African countries' support

By Ingrid Salgado
Business Report, South Africa
a href=http://www.businessreport.co.zahttp://www.businessreport.co.za/a
May 11, 2001

Durban -- Africa's gold-producing countries were urged
yesterday to back plans to get top bullion banks and US
Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan into the
witness stand of a US court, to answer claims of gold
price manipulation.

The Gold Anti-Trust Association (GATA) made the appeal
at a seminar attended by South African mining houses,
trade unionists, the Reserve Bank, and government
officials from a handful of African countries, including
Ghana and Ivory Coast.

GATA alleged that investment houses Citigroup, Goldman
Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, and Chase Manhattan,
together with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)
and the world's central banks, were colluding to keep the
gold price low to stall losses arising from the lending of
bullion reserves.

The complex allegations have been labelled a quot;conspiracy
theoryquot; by sceptics who follow the standard explanation that
surplus bullion is feeding the low gold price.

But Bill Murphy, GATA's colourful chairman, who has enlisted
the support of Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, yesterday
implored African nations to take the matter to the Black
Caucus, the US Congressional lobby that opposed plans to
sell a portion of gold reserves of the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) to fund debt relief in developing countries.

Murphy also called on interested parties to demand answers
from, among others, Bank of England governor Eddie George,
Greenspan, the US treasury, the IMF, and the BIS. quot;We would
like President (Thabo) Mbeki to ask these questions himself,quot;
Murphy said.

The allegations revolve around the practice by central banks
to lend gold reserves at low interest rates to bullion banks,
which in turn sell the gold to earn higher interest.

The problem arose, said GATA, when it was time for trading
houses to repay the debt.

If the gold price was too high, bullion banks would incur
massive losses. Hence it was in the interests of central banks
to bail out the bullion banks by colluding to suppress the price.

GATA claimed that between 10,000 and 16,000 tons of gold
had been borrowed in this way. quot;It will take about a decade to
empty the vaults,quot; said Frank Veneroso, a GATA member and
international finance consultant. quot;If our numbers are correct, it
can't go on for much longer.quot;

Representatives of mining houses -- among them AngloGold
and Gold Fields, which have admitted to funding GATA when
it was formed two years ago -- attended the seminar but would
not comment on whether they supported GATA's claims.

* * *

Mining Web story:

a href=http://www.theminingweb.comhttp://www.theminingweb.com/a

a href=http://www.mips1.net/MGGold.nsf/Current/4225685F0043D1B242256A4900369Eht...
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