‘All you need is a blowtorch, borax and the gold and you melt it and pour it into whatever form.’
Gold bars like those stolen from a Guyanese boat in Curaçao a week ago could be easily made locally by anyone as moulds are readily available on the market.
Checks by Stabroek News yesterday confirmed that at least two mining supply companies in Georgetown sell moulds for transforming gold into ingots of varying weights between 10 oz and five pounds as well as equipment for undertaking the process, including melting furnaces, jewellery torches and ceramic crucible pots.
The chemical borax is most commonly used in Guyana for melting gold and can be bought from any drug store as it is also used for house cleaning.
“Anybody can put their gold into bars and that’s what most of the licensed buyers do, once they have the required amount of smelted gold to meet the mould weight specification… all you need is a blowtorch, borax and the gold and you melt it and pour it into whatever form,” a miner explained yesterday.
Distinguishing markers on gold bars are not mandatory, a mining official, meanwhile, stated. However, some dealers have assigned seals on their gold bars for their own personal or security reasons and to make for easy reference and tracking.
The heist in Curaçao, during which 70 bars weighing 216 kilogrammes were taken by armed men who posed as police, has raised questions about how they were processed and there have been suggestions that it had to be done by large-scale companies here.
While 70 bars could be done quickly using the computerized furnaces of some of the large-scale mining companies here, large scale buyers, as they accumulate raw gold from small miners, transform them into bars. Bars of gold have been displayed by some miners/buyers on television in the recent past.
There are still questions about the origin of the gold and whether it was mined here.
Authorities in Curaçao have maintained that the shipment was legal, saying that it was cleared electronically on Thursday prior to the arrival of the boat, the ‘Summer Bliss.’ However, there are certain procedures to be followed when exporting gold and there appears to be no record of that shipment leaving Guyana.
Stabroek News was told by a police source that Guyana is conducting two simultaneous investigations; one spearheaded by the Ministry of Natural Re-sources and the Environment and the other by the police.
The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment is to dispatch a team to Curaçao to follow up on the heist and it is expected to leave on Monday.
Last Friday, the vessel arrived in Curaçao at 4 am and was attacked shortly after mooring.
According to police reports, the robbers went to the port area in three different cars and guards let them inside the restricted area in the mistaken belief that they were customs officials.
The men’s jackets had the word “police” in English although in Curaçao the word would be written in Papiamento, one of the island’s three official languages, as “polis.”
News agency Amigoe reported that six men, carrying guns and wearing masks and hoodies along with the police jackets stormed the ship. At gunpoint, they pushed the 51-year-old captain as well as the three Guyanese crewmen onto the ground.
The perpetrators apparently knew their way around the ship and walked directly to the three metal boxes with the gold bars and they reportedly took only five minutes to remove them.
