The wildcat goldminers doomed by their toxic trade

www.reuters.com
By TIM COCKS and DAVID LEWIS
16-20 minutes

BAWDIE, Ghana – A few years after coming as a teenager to this Ghanaian town to prospect for gold, Yaw Ngoha had made enough cash to marry his sweetheart and build a house with a porch, to which he would later add a flat-screen TV and satellite dish.

So when a town elder invited a doctor to talk to miners about the hazards of wildcat mining, “nobody listened,” said the 36-year-old, sitting on a wooden bench on his porch in a lush banana grove.

“We needed money.”

Since Ngoha started prospecting in the early 2000s, more and more people like him have helped Ghana grow into Africa’s biggest gold producer. Across the continent and beyond, millions have turned to the trade. Few are deterred by the risks.

Ngoha’s friends and family members started to sicken and die, but he told himself this had nothing to do with the amount of dust they’d been breathing in or the toxins – including mercury and nitric acid – they used to extract the gold.

One morning in 2016, Ngoha started coughing up blood. It felt like his airways were collapsing. His doctor treated him for tuberculosis.

Exclusive: Fake-branded bars slip dirty gold into world markets

www.reuters.com
Peter Hobson
13-16 minutes
LONDON (Reuters) - A forgery crisis is quietly roiling the world’s gold industry.
July 5, 2019. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

Gold bars fraudulently stamped with the logos of major refineries are being inserted into the global market to launder smuggled or illegal gold, refining and banking executives tell Reuters. The fakes are hard to detect, making them an ideal fund-runner for narcotics dealers or warlords.

In the last three years, bars worth at least $50 million stamped with Swiss refinery logos, but not actually produced by those facilities, have been identified by all four of Switzerland’s leading gold refiners and found in the vaults of JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the major banks at the heart of the market in bullion, said senior executives at gold refineries, banks and other industry sources.

Progress and its discontents

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