Is Barrick a front to cover up gold-laundering?
That is, unless Barrick was a front to cover up gold laundering by governments, in which case unilateral forward selling was not a mistake but a deliberate policy. I couldn’t help but believe that the company had a vested interest in suppressing the price of gold. Its ambition to become No. 1 also points that way. It is not about vanity. It is about pricing power. The suspicion that Barrick is a front to cover up a gigantic gold-laundering operation, presumably on behalf of a government (or governments) that need more time to complete a gold-acquisition program in the order of thousands of tons of gold, is hard to escape. Incidentally, if you interpret ‘gold laundering’ as a polite expression for ‘stealing shareholder gold’, no harm done. Clearly, such a conspiracy theory can never be proved or disproved. I was not the only one who suggested it. GATA and Golden Sextant named Barrick as a co-conspirator in the illegal scheme to suppress the gold price. When in the early 1990’s Barrick s
