"Absolutely Brilliant" TV Appearance

Background Information on Boudewijn Wegerif
Vice Chairperson, Gold Anti-Trust Action (GATA)

Boudewijn Wegerif was born in Holland in 1936 and brought up in South Africa. He
is now a British citizen living in Sweden.

Wegerif was controlling director of a subsidiary publishing company and managing
editor of industrial-economic publications for South African Associated
Newspapers, now Independent News, before being banished from South Africa in
1971 for organizing interracial discussion groups at a church conference center
in defiance of the apartheid regime.

"The banishment experience caused me to rethink my position in life," Wegerif
says. "Since economics and finance had been so much part of my work life, I
spent many years on a study of the history and psychology of money to try to
understand money's role in society better. The more I got into it, the more I
realized how wrong and inappropriate our present debt-based money system is for
the challenges we face. I got really mad about the way banks and financial
institutions are able to create out of nothing what is called money and what is
actually debt, and how this is breaking down societies and the environment
everywhere, including the United States. I started being invited to give talks
and lead seminars on the money issue."

Today Wegerif is project manager of a monetary studies program associated with a
residential college of adult education near Stockholm. In recent years he has
made two marathon walking journeys "to help bring healing to the economies of
the world and the devastated environment -- a walking prayer for the earth," he
says.

The first walk was to Rome from Uppsala, Sweden, in 1990; the second was to Cape
Town, South Africa, from Kiruna in northern Sweden, from April 1995 to December
1997. "Along the way I gave hundreds of talks, mainly at churches, on the theme
of love's victory over the debt cross of the world,' Wegerif says. ``The GO
GATA campaign is part of that victory."

Just as he was active in South Africa in the 1960s for an end to racial
apartheid, so now, Wegerif says, he is working to bring an end to the global
economic apartheid between the so-called hard-currency countries and what he
calls the non-currency countries.

"People say that gold plays no part in our divided world economy, but I say that
it has very much to do with it. Gold is being deliberately played down and
priced down, not only for financial gain by the cartel that GATA is exposing,
but also because its reinstatement as an international means of exchange
threatens the unjust world order of what the historian Max Shapiro called the
penniless billionaires -- the people who score off credits."

Wegerif's main role in GATA is as a publicist seeking to broad popular support
for the antitrust lawsuit against the cartel controlling the price and supply of
gold. He created a GATA email group: gata@egroups.com.

"The lawsuit we are preparing obviously will be of major importance to
gold-mining companies and their shareholders," he says. "But I want to show that
it is also important for everyone who knows that a genuinely free market
requires anti-trust vigilance and legal action against cartels, and that
sustainable economic development is not possible without this discipline."

As a monetary reformist, Wegerif believes that fractional reserve banking should
end and that every city, region, and country should have the right to supply its
own money as a public service. But Wegerif sees gold playing a crucial role in
the transition from a totally undisciplined financial system to one with just
and sustainable economies.

"In the economies of the future, I see gold still being treasured, along with
silver, as the outer symbol of the inner mettle needed to win life's battles,"
Wegerif says. "Just as in sport today we give gold and silver medals to the
winners and second-bests, why not in the future give gold and silver coins to
champions of cooperatively competitive enterprise?

"As I see the future, on the one hand there will be a system of digitized,
interest-free exchange money, and alongside this there will be non-convertible
gold and silver coins with which to earn one's place on the social ladder. But
first these precious metals must be freed from being held hostage to fortune by
unscrupulous dealers."

Wegerif can be reached at Idaberg, 153 92 Holo, Stockholm, Sweden. Telephone
+46.8.551.57841. Email: monetarystudies@hotmail.com.

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