Loading ...Africa’s Largest Refinery Finds 2.7 Tons Of Gold “Missing” After Computer System Upgrade
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/25/2014 15:38 -0400
It’s one thing to implicitly admit that there is a physical gold shortage and as a result nations – such as Germany – are unable to repatriate their physical gold held in the safe and trusted confines 90 feet below the NY Fed, gold which may or may not be there and has likely been leased out exponentially to cover paper shorts by virtually every BIS-overseen central bank (and the BIS paper gold selling team itself of course). It is something totally different to corzine, as in vaporize, 87,000 ounces of physical gold, some 2.7 tons, and blame it on a computer upgrade glitch. Which is precisely what Rand, Afrrica’s largest refinery and processor of about a third of the world’s gold since 1920, has done after it “discovered” that $113 million in precious metal was missing after “adopting a new computer system.”
Bloomberg reports that the refinery in Germiston, a town 20 kilometers east of Johannesburg, has 87,000 ounces of physical gold less than the amount present in its accounting records after “implementation difficulties” with the new system, the company said in a statement today. That’s worth about $113 million at today’s price of $1,296 an ounce.
Taking a page out of China’s infinite rehypothecation scheme, the South African refiner essentially told its investors, most of whom are gold miners, to step up and replenish the missing metal or else investors may come asking questions about their own reported gold holdings. And, it succeeded.