World Of Secrets - The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam: 3. The battle for Busang

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

As the value of the Indonesian gold discovery skyrockets, it’s not just everyday investors who want in. Powerful players are drawn into the fight for the gold in Busang. But Bre-X, a small company, has only ever traded as a penny stock. Can it stand up to powerful rivals and play in the big leagues?The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam was first published in May 2024.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. network of compounds where thousands are held captive and forced to scam others under the threat of death. Follow Scam Factory on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From the BBC's investigations podcast, World of Secrets, here's the third episode of our guest season, the $6 billion gold scam from the BBC World Service and CBC. Well, the first trip that I made out there was sort of a familiarization trip. We needed to do some work, we needed to find out what exactly was going on, We needed to do some work. We needed to find out what exactly was going on, just to kind of get a feel for the place and to meet the people.

Dave Potter was a geologist with Freeport, a big U.S. mining company. He wanted to check out the mine site in case Freeport made a deal with Pre-X. He choppered out to Buse. When I got off the helicopter, I looked at the camp, and the camp was pretty well squared away. I was pretty impressed with the job that they'd done. It was obviously a camp that they'd been in for a while, and they turned it into a home, if you will.

There was a lot of busyness around the camp, people coming and going, and the first night we had dinner together and as geologists will we drank too much beer and told lies to each other, which was a good start. And things on the ground looked good, at least at first. When I first went out there I was was fairly happy that, yeah, this looked like a typical exploration effort and something that we had seen before and would see again. And this was a good start.

He spent some time with the two men at the heart of the Breaks operation. John Felderhoff was there, Michael DeGuzman, but he was really quiet and he kind of came in and out. We had a good meal together and spent a lot of time talking about the geology and the deposit. And John spent a lot of time telling us how it was, you know, the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I remember John told us about his birthday present at that point in time. His wife had bought him a, I think it was a Lamborghini. And he was quite excited about that and showed us pictures of it. So we had, yeah, it was an interesting evening.

Then Dave Potter asked to look at the gold, core samples taken from the mine. That's exactly right. I wanted to look at some of the core that was in the sheds there. I was a little disappointed because there wasn't a lot of core. Most of the core that they had came from the initial, the early drilling that they had done. I was somewhat surprised that they didn't have more examples of what they were drilling because they just drilled thousands of meters of rock and I was surprised that there wasn't more core available to look at. Not a huge red flag for Potter, but something felt a little off.

Still, this was one of the largest gold deposits in history. Freeport wasn't the only mining company focusing their attention on the discovery. A fight was brewing. Huge money was at stake and some powerful people were willing to do whatever it would take to get their hands on it. I'm Suzanne Wilton and 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, and how greed can obscure the truth. This is episode three, the battle for Busan.

So I'm walking down this beautiful street which has an incredible canopy of trees and vines and towering palms. This is Chandana Street and it's the heart of Jakarta power and wealth and it's also the home of the Suharto family. On my left I'm passing Zuharto's house. It's bright lime green with clay roof and quite spread out, multiple cars in front, and of course security at the front of the house. And this is in the heart of Jakarta, the heart of the business district, and the seat of government just streets away.

There are rumors in this area that there are tunnels underneath these houses that connect them together. And you can just imagine the intrigue and the deals done behind these closed doors. I wonder if Mike de Guzman or John Felderhoff or others walked these streets in making a deal with the Suharto family over the players vying for a piece of the pie. Everything went through Suharto. And what I mean by everything is you could not do business there unless you go through Suharto.

So he literally had very, very ironclad control over the whole country. Richard Jacobson worked for a private investigation company in Hong Kong and was based in Indonesia. He's no stranger to intrigue. Before he started working in private investigation, he was a CIA agent. You couldn't do anything there without the Saharto blessing it. And it was very centralized. So what did that mean for Briex as this company started to skyrocket and the projections got bigger and bigger? It obviously meant that we came to Soharto's attention.

And that's when the Soharto family became involved with Briex. Suharto came to power in 1967. He was complicated and charismatic. He boosted the economy, opening up the country to foreign investment. But his rule was known for widespread corruption and repression, and some say even worse. One interview that stuck with me was with Simon Sembiring, the former director general

of the mining department in Indonesia. He told me that speaking out about what he saw going on behind the scenes at the time could have been deadly. I should be honest to you. I'm afraid to tell somebody about this. They can kill me. Man is very, very dangerous. Okay, so actually we'll start by just asking you

to give your first and last and what your role was with Brex. Hi, I'm Brian Coats. I was vice president and corporate controller at Brex. Brian Coats joined Brex in July 1996. Almost straight away, he found himself thrown into an escalating situation in Indonesia. I mean, the nickname of Mrs. Suardo was Mrs. 10%. What did that mean? That didn't talk about how much tips she left when she went to the restaurant, it was how much ownership she would have in ventures.

Fending off the Indonesian government was always going to be difficult. But Brix had an added problem. Their mining permit for Busan was set to expire. When it did, Suharto brought work to a grinding halt. Brix did not own the rights, known as a title, to the land in Busan the Indonesian government did. If they wanted another permit, Brix was told it needed to share the mine with another company, and this company would be chosen by the government. This company would then send money to Suharto. The best Briex could hope for was to influence the company chosen and to keep a decent percentage of the mine.

That's when Peter Monk enters the story. Monk had built his company, Barrick Gold Corporation, up from nothing into the biggest gold business in the world. Sensing an opportunity, he made his way to Jakarta and took over the whole top floor of one of the city's five-star hotels. Exploration geologist Jim Richards was based in Jakarta during this time. Their sole mission was to hunt down John Felderhof and do the deal. And he was doing the sweetener job on Tommy Sahado. Peter Monk was moving heaven and earth to get John Felderhof into

his office. And he wasn't the kind of guy that you could say no to either, particularly in Indonesia with Tommy Sahado next to you. So John Felderhoff, he had gone to ground and you couldn't find him for love nor money. Nobody knew where he was. And that was the kind of crazy environment that was going on in Jakarta at that time. People were hunting people and looking for people

and have you seen him? And it was like that. ["The Last Supper"] Monk liked to pepper his speeches with sayings. people and have you seen him?" And it was like that. Monk liked to pepper his speeches with sayings. One of his favorites was, quote, life is about meeting objectives. Sometimes your objectives cross other peoples, then you have to fight and fight to win. As Briech's new vice president, Brian Coats was to negotiate with the Indonesian government and Barak Gold. Right away there was, we were right in the middle of discussions. Barak had

expressed interest and the dance started. And when you talk about the dance, who was leading? The leading candidate to be was Barrick. And these are very sophisticated players. We're talking Peter Monk with, you know, political leaders. How did that stack up against David Walsh? So obviously, Barrick had probably the best group of people around the table advising Mr. Monk. At that point in time, former Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney was on the international committee and on the board. George Bush, former President Bush, the father, was an advisor to the company and a number of other prominent worldwide businessmen.

Barrick had gotten one of their board members, former U.S. President George Bush Senior no less, to send a letter to President Suharto recommending he do the deal with them. I'm just going to try to connect to Monk now. Sure. Just a sec, hang in. Okay. Mr. Monk, are you there? I'm speaking. I'm here.

Rich? Yes, hello. Hello there, how are you doing? How are you, Mr. Monk? Journalist Richard Behar, who shared the Brix tapes with us, kept a recording of an hour-long interview with Barak Gold's Peter Monk, in which Monk talks about his fight for Brix.

In the archive interview, Monk was keen to play down the influence of Bush's letter. But to me it was such a childish thing to assume that a multi-billion dollar project, a project of this importance to the national economy of Indonesia will be determined or given or not given by a letter an expensive rights to somebody. I mean, it's such a childish thing. What does he, what does Bush get paid to be on your international board? Nothing. Monk was annoyed that people latched on to this one, thinking it would be powerful enough to win him the

mind. He didn't just rely on letters. Monk went directly to the Indonesian government, hoping to get to the front of the queue. He started to play the game from the smart end, the Indonesian end, getting inside the politics of an authoritarian regime. I would say it was intense on the side of Barak. Barak had lined up some support and some discussions, you know, so that was a challenging aspect there was there. What was challenging about that?

Well, Barak certainly had some relationships with the minister of mine, Sujana, and one of his advisors, Ganto, who was in the background and a fixer. But there was a lot of controversy. There's also rumour to have been some dinners in Toronto where the minister of Mine was there receiving letters from Barrick and also expressing interest to the government of Indonesia that they would like to participate in the development of this world-class ore body. So they were trying to secure their position. Certainly means by which we were not used to play. In Richard Behar's interview with the late Peter Monk, he brings up a dossier that Barak allegedly handed

to the Ministry of Mines. A dossier? Yeah, about four inches of documents to the ministry. And this was information that was damaging to Brix. And I spoke with an official at the ministry about this who reviewed it and the official believes that this was done to harm Brix. And done by whom? By Barrick. He said it was none of Barrick's business. Why in the world did they come in here, drop this material off, he said that if you want to submit stuff like this, put it into a formal report.

And I said, why do you think this was done? He said the intention was to hurt Briex and to harm Briex's relationship with the government. I will say it, but I have no idea about that. Okay. In November 1996, Monk's offer to Briech's was a 75-25 split, not in Briech's favor. This was alarming to Briech's. Monk knew that nepotism was the most effective way to win favor with the Indonesian government. So Beric built an alliance with Suharto's daughter Tutu. Peter Monk tells Richard Behar that he was prepared to use any contact he could to gain

access to the decision makers. I think there was a lot of anger. They felt that, and there's been a lot of criticism criticism that barick ingratiated itself with the ministry uh... basically placed itself you know at the at the forefront

by hiring the daughter of the dictator there and i don't know now now richard not marla come on don't no no i mean if you don't agree to have a higher daughter you're going to do something we were selected smart, come on, don't. You don't ingratiate yourself by hiring a daughter. You ingratiate yourself, we weren't selected, you damn right I ingratiate myself. If I got a cell, we discovered that BX was not the owner of that deposit. And we discovered that, I mean, we built our company by doing bids. And for the first time in our life, we discovered it was a billion

or two billion or three billion dollar company who did not own the deposit which the shareholders absolutely were convinced they owned. The title did not belong to them. Well, Christ, who owns the title? Well, the title belonged, lo and behold, according to all the lawyers who sent it, to the government. Okay, but it's not unusual for a junior mining company to find things in that country when they had a pending application. Exactly.

It was no title to the deposit and no analyst ever highlighted that fact. But what was your thinking? Why was your next step to hire Hart you know, Hartarto and Tutu? I'm just wondering what was the thinking? The thinking was that if you want a gold mine and you find that the company you thought owned it does not own it, and you find out that Mr. X owns it, you go to Mr. X.

But Mr. X in this case was the government. And we hired anybody we could. I mean, we had, I don't know, 18 people there who could help us get to the highest level of government. Because if they don't own it, you want it. Oh, no, no, no, no. But clear by the statements of B.X. that they did not have the financial wherewithal,

their plan was to auction. And we did absolutely everything in our power to sell ourselves to the owner. And the owner was the government. And we, you know, the mining minister was in Canada, and we looked around, and I personally looked around, and I mobilized every contact that I had from the banking contacts to the government contacts

to put me in touch with people who can get me to the highest level of the government so I can make my pitch at the highest level. It seems that Breaks felt they had no choice but to strike back. One of the good parts of the story is I think how Breaks stood up to large corporate companies that had connections and we fought back. So we played pretty hard.

How did that, what did that look like? At one point in time we hired President Suardo's son. And I think the credit to that goes from the people that were working at Brex at the time, from the advisors that were working at Breaks at the time, from the advisors that were involved. If this is going to be debated at the dinner table on Sundays or Saturday night, we'll get a seat at the table, I guess. That was sort of our response.

Hiring Suharto's son Sige as a consultant would turn out to be a masterstroke by Breaks. But it didn't seem like that at first. Breaks going toe-to-toe with Barrick in the nepotism stakes raised the ante. Intel that could help Barrick secure a deal became very valuable. They knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. And that was not just corporately, that was individually. How did they do that?

So they would do by investigating us. You know, there's various incidents that happened. They were par for the course. Barrick had hired Croll and Associates out of New York, very prominent private investigators. With so much at stake and private investigators swarming like flies around Breaks, paranoia set in. And the paranoia wasn't helped by Walsh claiming there had been a break-in at his Calgary office and two weeks earlier, his wife finding someone rifling through the garbage, all prompting

Walsh to send a memo advising employees to shred sensitive materials. This only increased Brian's paranoia. I suspect that they had access to our documents. There's rumors that they were going through our garbage and so on and so forth. In 2001, it was disclosed that Barrick had obtained sensitive internal Briex documents via Kroll Associates. How the documents reached Kroll was never explained. They could have been leaked, of course, but these were unprecedented times.

We contacted Barrick, Gold and Kroll and put these allegations to them, but they declined to comment. However, in the Briex tapes, Richard Behar asks the late Peter Monk about claims that Barrick hired private detectives to investigate Brix senior executives. One of the things that I think upset the Brix people was that Barrick had enlisted private detectives to… I don't know what you're talking about. Oh, you don't? Barrack had enlisted private detectives to... I don't know what you're talking about.

Oh, you don't? No, I don't know what you're talking about. Probably to get the appointment? At this point, Richard Behar had already spoken with Randall Oliphant, who at the time was Barrack's chief financial officer. I spoke to Oliphant. He confirmed it. What did he have?

That Barrack's attorneys used private detectives. On whom? To dig up information about Brix and about Brix executives. And I'll tell you, these private eyes... Well, I have never seen information from Brix executives, from private detectives, ever. Never. Private detectives... On Brix executives? Showed up at Brix executives showed up at Brix executives homes in Canada and in the Philippines To do what talk to their families to do what to try to find out who these people were And we try to make the bid I'm sorry. No, this is what we at the time we try to make the bid This is during the spring and the summer and even into the fall of 1996

Richard I have never never This is during the spring and the summer and even into the fall of 1996. Richard, I have never, never used, seen or heard or would care what Roly Francisco's private life is about. Never. I don't know how that could help me or hinder me. Briex's chief financial officer, Roly Francisco, who was leading negotiations at the time, had also spoken about experiencing suspicious activity. Roly says that every time he went home to Canada, there would be a van staking out his home. I'm afraid that there's something I have absolutely, absolutely zero knowledge of. I would never have authorized, and I'm not aware of it. Ova 5 said to me that they needed, they wanted,

you know, it's standard procedure during takeovers. Yes, in February. They called a takeover off in February. Why did the private eyes continue into the spying? I don't know. Believe me, I called the shots here. Do you think- As I told my board, if anybody is responsible for this failure, it's Peter Munk. Do you think you could inquire about this?

I have no interest. It wasn't just allegations of private investigators doggedly following the story. Investigative journalists did their fair share of digging as well. In fact, any break-ins and rifling through garbage could have been one of many other interested parties. Investors and analysts were also desperate for intel. It was like the Wild West, and rumor and speculation was part and parcel of such crazy times. Scam Factory, the explosive new true crime podcast from Wondery,

exposes a multi-billion dollar criminal empire operating in plain sight. Every suspicious text you ignore masks a huge network of compounds where thousands are held captive and forced to scam others under the threat of death. Follow Scam Factory on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Brian was already suspicious of private investigators used during hostile takeover bids. We knew how they worked and we were also advised that they were working against us at that point in time. So was this surprising to you? Everything is surprising, I guess, in the Breaks story.

To compound Breaks' stresses, the Indonesian government let it be known that if the Barrick deal went through, they would be taking a 10% share, leaving Barrick with 67.5% of the mine and Breaks a measly 22.5%. For a time, the Indonesian government looked to be hot on this deal and tried to force a shotgun marriage between Breaks and Barak. The Breaks inner circle, Walsh, Felderhoff and de Guzman, were appalled. If you look at the Breaks story, nobody enjoyed the way Barak was playing the game. So there was a lot of animosity against Barrick at

that point in time. John, being the colorful person that he was, highlighted comments that, you know, the closest thing that Mr. Monk had been to rocks was the Scotch and the Rocks. So we fight today and we're friends tomorrow. You also got to remember that this was war. You've described it very much as the story of David versus Goliath. Why? It was David and Goliath, where you had us as a small company, fighting off larger companies that did pretty well to stay in the game. that did pretty well to stay in the game. Suharto's son Sigit, who was still battling for Briex, gave them what was to become a very valuable bit of advice.

He told them to bring Suharto's right-hand man, Bob Hassan, to the table. Andrew Neal was an observer to the war between Barak and Brix when he worked for the mining company Freeport. Well this is delving into the into the realm of soap operas. Andrew saw the conflict break out in Suharto's family and with other companies who were trying to muscle their way in by making overtures to more of Suharto's kids. Suharto's family were known as the Chindana family because of the location of their complex.

They all lived together in this massive complex, they still do to a certain extent. And Barrick were lobbying the Chindana family and had put a couple of the children on retainers. And Placer, they retained a couple of the other children to lobby on their behalf. And historically the Cendana family would have supper together just about every day. The kids were fighting in front of dad and mom, to the point that there was a real split coming in the family. The Zuhartos were in meltdown. The children were bickering over busang, each one bagged by a different mining company.

Barak had the powerful eldest daughter Tutu advising them, Breaks had Sigit, and now Placer Dome turned the heads of yet two more. The president needed to find a way out before his family went into freefall. He needed wise counsel. He needed Mohammed Bob Hassan. So my understanding is Bob Hassan,

who was a close advisor to Suharto and also a very good friend of Freeport, said to Suharto, you know, you're going to have to resolve this. This is ridiculous. And Suharto asked for his input and he said, quite frankly, you need to give it to a third party. Somewhere within this dogfight, Bob Hassan, an Indonesian timber tycoon and Suharto's closest confidant, not to mention his golfing buddy, spotted a golden opportunity.

There was a way here he could engineer his own slice of the Busang mine. Richard Behar and David Walsh in the Breaks tapes. Let me jump back to his son. Yeah, you had to repair your relationship even before you met him. He had he had heard things about you. Well, I think everyone in Indonesia had preconceived ideas that from the disinformation campaign. Do you know what he had heard?

No, but I'm sure I didn't pay much attention to it. But I just knew that the perception of me and Breaks as a company was very poor. During the battle for Busan, Barak discredited Breaks, and Bob Hassan got wind of this. Which could be a huge problem for the company. Anyone who wanted in on the deal needed Hassan on their side. He was sort of the guy that carried the bag for the president. He was the man that the president would send out to make sure that he got what he wanted. — That's David Potter again, Freeport's chief geologist who carried out the due diligence at Boosang. — So Bob had a lot of power behind him.

He had the president's ear, so people treaded very lightly around him. — But there were other reasons for treading lightly. — I don't know that I'd want to cross Bob Hassan. The rumor had it that he was somebody that had the kind of connections that he could make people disappear. Luckily for Breaks, Barak's relationship with Bob Hassan wasn't much better. Hassan and Barak CEO Peter Monk had never been the best of friends and then Monk made a wrong move. During a meeting Monk had

put his hand on Hassan's knee. Monk was very tactile and would use endearments like darling to address people he didn't know very well. Placing his hand on Hassan's knee was a cultural faux pas. Allowing for personal space in Indonesia is a sign of respect. Along with Hassan's dislike for Barak's strategy, Monk's apparent lack of respect was the final straw for Hassan. Barak was ruled out as a contender. Enter Freeport.

The U.S. mining giant had already made one huge gold find in another area of Indonesia. And Suharto liked the company's CEO, a man named Jim Bob Moffat. A former American football player and larger than life Elvis impersonating Texan with a reputation for getting what he wanted. Importantly, Bob Hassan liked him too. Things moved fast now, maybe because this was the deal Hassan had always had in mind. He helped close it for Freeport.

Suddenly it dropped in Freeport's lap. And I think it was really not totally voluntary. It was assigned and Moffat said, okay, we'll do it. That's Dan Bowman. He was a vice president at Freeport, and Jim Bob assigned him to sort out the details of the Brex transaction. Suharto, when he wanted to do something, he would write in the margins of letters,

like for ministers, they were called dipnotes. And basically the dipnote would say, do this, and then it would go down through the chain of authority. And Bob Hassan showed me the dip note. That was the appointment. And Moffat couldn't refuse that. You don't defy the president? No, no, bad idea.

Jim Bob Moffat was another person it was best not to defy. Moffat and Suharto had a very close relationship. They had similar personalities. They didn't like underlings who expressed doubts about their vision. Moffat always said, Are you boys ready to fight an adventure? You know, whenever he would have a new thing to do. Which I thought was a great way to put it. He sounds like he was an incredible character.

He was really something. He was really, really something. And he scared the hell out of most people. I thought he was one of the funniest guys I ever met. Because he had this sense of presence. And he would mess with people. And if you didn't see the humor in the situation, you'd think, oh my god, this guy is dangerously unbalanced.

Ha ha ha. and see the humor in the situation, you'd think, oh my God, this guy is dangerously unbalanced. So with Freeport in, what did that mean for Brex? A meeting was organized with all the interested parties. This was Brex's chance to try and rescue as much as they could out of the situation. I was called to a meeting at Bob Hassan's house on February 14th, Valentine's Day, 1997. And at the meeting were Jim Bob Moffat and also Bob Hassan. And there was a guy there named Roly Francisco,

who was the newly appointed CFO of Brex. And the purpose of the meeting was to find out how we were going to split the ownership of Brex between the various parties. So we walked in and Mr. Moffat was a larger-than-life character, very colorful, and he was a no-nonsense kind of guy. We had about 10 seconds of small talk, and he said to Roelly Francisco, what do you want? And Roelly Francisco said, well, Jim Bob, we want $100 million in cash for this transaction. And without missing a beat, Moffat said,

this could be salted. Get up, boys, we're leaving. Wow. Salting is the process of adding gold to a drilling sample to make it look like there is more gold than there is. There's a chance that Moffat had concerns about the validity and the scale of the Briex find. But more than likely, this was just a negotiation tactic. We said, okay, because you never said no to Moffat. And he got up and he walked out and we trailed behind him.

Bob Hassan, who was at the meeting, was shocked. And he was trailing behind Moffat asking what's going on. And Mr. Moffat got in his car and drove away. And I went home kind of bewildered, and at about one o'clock in the morning, Mr. Moffat called me and he said, I know what these want. They don't think we have the money.

So I called my friend at Chase Bank and I got a billion dollars. You go tell those we have the money. Bob Hassan, Jim Bob Moffat and Brix eventually came to a deal on Valentine's Day 1997. Brix's sole ownership of Busan would be no more. The mine was to be split three ways. Forty five percent to Brix, forty to Indonesia and for one hundred

million dollars, fifteen percent to Freeport. In the Brex tapes, David Walsh spoke to Richard Behar shortly after the deal. Did you feel that in a way this deal was also forced on you, David? That you didn't really have a choice in the end? Hassan said this is the way it's going to be. Well, as I said in my press release the other day. No, no, no, but help me be honest. Okay, no, no, but what I said is exactly the truth.

The other day I said, other companies, actually I wasn't allowed to say what I wanted to say, so I toned down the press release, but other companies didn't discover it, never spent a dime, carried on negotiations without including us. I mean, did Freeport do a lot of the negotiating without you at the table? No, they were called in at the last minute. I sat and had a talk with Jim Bob and then asked for our okay and I immediately gave it.

And the guys at Freeport have a real passion for what they do like we do. You know, they're really energized as they called Jim Bob. Really energized is right. Freeport were thrilled. Paul Murphy from Freeport remembers Jim Bob's announcement to the company's Jakarta office. It was Valentine's Day, I remember that, February, I think it was 97. Our chairman, Jim Bob Moffat, called us all together in the Jakarta office and said, hey guys, I've got a Valentine's Day present for you. I've just struck a deal with Bob Assan and Breaks. We're going to design, develop, and operate

this fantastic gold deposit in Kalimantan. It's going to be a change for us, but we have the ability to pull it off. He made it clear from the very beginning, not as an afterthought, but he made the proviso. Of course, we've got to do our due diligence. And he turned to proviso, of course we've got to do our due diligence. And he turned to Dave Potter, who was the senior exploration geologist at the time, and said, Dave, I want you to immediately start this afternoon, get yourself organized,

and I want you to start drilling twin holes in the Busan deposit. In gold exploration, twinning is a way to check the validity of drilling results. If someone says they have found gold in a particular spot, then you drill a hole right next to it so you can test the sample for traces. If they really found gold, then so should you. So Dave's job was immediately to set up a drill rig and start drilling in the top 10 or 20 richest core samples to drill a hole within a few feet of the original hole to try to duplicate the results. So everybody was very excited. This was going to be a new chapter for us.

Freeport had sent Dave Potter out to Busan once before, but as he prepared to go again, some of the things he'd seen on the last trip were giving him cause for concern. Before Freeport handed over 100 million dollars to Breaks, they needed to be sure what they were getting into. Dave shared his concerns with Jim Bob Moffat. I was a little concerned about the lack of core and he said yeah okay and then I said well I think we should drill what I called scissor holes which we'd get into the line of the cross-section that they'd drill and drill back at an angle in both directions so

that we would intercept at least four of the drill holes that they'd been working in. And he'd said, well that may be too much because we want to make this move a little faster. And I said, I really think we ought to do it Jim Bob. And he finally said, sure, okay go ahead do that. If he really didn't think it was a good idea, he wouldn't let me do it. Dave quickly assembled a team of geologists to take out to Busan, including exploration manager Joe McPherson. We had our first introduction to the Breaks guys just up the street from the former Freeport office which was across from the Australian embassy at the time.

And it was at 10 o'clock in the morning. I remember this very clearly because we all chipped up there. We're kind of, you know, we're chuffed, we're ready to go and we went in there and there's a bunch of Brix guys there. Degusman was there, Felderhof was there and out came the beer right away, 10 o'clock in the morning. So we were all kind of looking at it. Oh okay, now what do we do? That's a fact and we had a couple to be polite but we kind of look at you, oh, okay, now what do we do? That's a fact. And we, you know, we had a couple to be polite to, but we kind of bailed pretty early at that time because we felt it wasn't really the right environment to be talking about, you know, how we were going to structure the actual due diligence itself. So you were there to talk about due diligence for what could be the biggest potential mine in the world and they're cracking bintang.

Yeah, they were cracking the beers at 10 o'clock in the morning. They were very laid back, very confident. You know, there was no sign of anything that was abyss. They were really excited themselves and looking forward to being partners with Freeport. And you know, it was a good meeting. We were just a little bit, you know, taken aback by the bintangs on the table at 10 o'clock in the morning. What was your first impression of Mike de Guzman and John Felderhoff? Michael de Guzman, very quiet, very quiet, soft spoken, didn't say much, clearly knew his geology. John Felderhoff I would tag more as a promoter type.

John was kind of the, he was the main spokesman, he did most of the talking and you can tell that he had been in the business for many years. After the first meeting, we kind of circled the wagons again and had a bit more of a discussion, planned our strategy, and said, well, we clearly are going to have to push this ourselves. There's nothing that can be hidden, right? So we went into it with that attitude that we were going to ask any question that we thought we had to and ask for data, you know, whatever is necessary to prove the viability of the deposit from a technical standpoint. After Barrick, Breaks were going to have a hard time trusting another major mining company. And they were very aware that Freeport might try to cast doubt on the find to drive down the price. Before Dave Potter left Jakarta for Busan, Simon Simbiring from the Indonesian Ministry of Mines reminded him of the responsibility resting on his shoulders. to potter, this is professional. No hanky-panky.

Because this is very, very sensitive. Man is very, very dangerous. Sembiring, of all people, knew just how high the stakes were. Up until now, Brix had been able to maintain a tight hold over busing. But with the Indonesian government now directly invested Up until now, Brix had been able to maintain a tight hold over Buseng. But with the Indonesian government now directly invested and Freeport on their way to scrutinize Felderhof and Degusman's work, this was to be the critical moment. If anything were to go wrong, if there was to be any question over the mine's value,

well then things would go south very, very quickly. Next time on the six billion dollar gold scam, things start to feel weird at the Busan site. Just got kind of quiet. Start getting this kind of a creepy feeling. Something just isn't right. And that's when things started to get interesting for us. People started disappearing. Dagoosman disappeared. The story of the briak's fortune begins to unravel. So I'm sitting on the side of my bed in the room with the royal yoke,

and I'm holding a six6 billion secret in my hand. 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 Hannes 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, Anne Dixie is senior podcast producer. And John Manel is the podcast commissioning editor.

Thanks for listening. Scam Factory, the explosive new true crime podcast from Wondery, exposes a multi-billion dollar criminal empire operating in plain sight. Every suspicious text you ignore masks a huge network of compounds where thousands are held captive and forced to scam others under the threat of death. Follow Scam Factory on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.