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Mix-Ansicht- Was die Goldminen sonst noch für Probleme haben... - Tofir, 27.03.2001, 21:19
Was die Goldminen sonst noch für Probleme haben...
aus der Financial Times
Raiders of the deep
By Gillian O'Connor
A couple of hundred cameras are monitored by two control rooms - the second one watches the first one. You are searched twice when leaving the high-security area of Anglo Platinum's precious metals refinery near Johannesburg.
First comes a thorough but surprisingly unobtrusive body search while you are still wearing your special-issue clothing. Expert hands run up and down. You put both hands in the air, turn round and show the sole of one foot, then the other. Finally you open your mouth wide, just as if you were at the dentist.
Then you take all your clothes off, and go into a small passage, like a glass box. There are a couple of security staff behind the window and you gyrate to their bidding. Hands up, turn round, first sole, second sole. At least you can keep your mouth shut this time.
Everyone has to do it: employees, visitors, even the managing director of Anglo Platinum, South Africa's largest platinum producer. And, of course, the security staff who do the searching are searched themselves when they leave the high-security unit.
Organised theft of precious metals is the second biggest criminal business in South Africa after drugs. One estimate is that there are at least 36 different syndicates with international backing devoted to stealing gold and platinum, which now rivals gold in importance to the South African economy.
The Chamber of Mines recently estimated that 35 tonnes - about 8 per cent of all gold produced by South Africa's mines - was being stolen. The thefts cost the industry about $300m a year, money that it desperately needs.
The industry's operating profits have been under pressure thanks to the sluggish gold price, and employment in the gold mines has halved in the past decade."Gold miners' profits would have been about a third higher without the thefts," said Anton van Achterbergh, a spokesman for the chamber.
Platinum is harder to steal, and the quantities produced are smaller. But platinum group metals - the main ones are platinum, palladium and rhodium - are far more valuable than gold. Platinum itself is in growing demand for jewellery, and all three metals have industrial uses, notably in catalytic convertors used in the motor industry to clean exhaust fumes in an increasingly environment-conscious world.
The chamber has no estimate for platinum"shrinkage". But if even 2 per cent of total South African production of platinum group metals is being stolen, the booty would total about 4 tonnes, worth a further $100m. No wonder the platinum companies say the thieves seem to be trying even harder.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the syndicates are well-organised and backed by big money. They have the pyramid structure of an old-fashioned business organisation.
At the bottom of the network company employees, often black, sometimes white, answer to a local middle-man. Higher up might be an Indian or Lebanese controller. But the big boss is probably in Europe. Mafia? This suggestion is greeted with a shrug.
Employees are recruited by a mixture of bribery and intimidation, with managers and security staff prime targets. Some companies suggest contract killings of reluctant recruits are used as a warning to other unwilling participants. Gold Fields, the country's second largest gold miner, was last year offering a reward of R100,000 (£9,700) for information on the killing of a manager at its Driefontein processing plant, the second such death in a year.
"They approach a man and offer him R10,000 if he goes to the lavatory for 10 minutes just before midnight. They tell him they know where he lives and where his family live. R10,000 is a lot of money for someone earning perhaps R5,000 a month, and the consequences of refusing could be dire," said one miner.
"The next time he only gets R2,000. And if he complains they threaten him with exposure of his first lapse."
Stealing gold is easier than stealing platinum, because the production process allows worthwhile quantities to be filched at several stages. Most South African mines are deep mines, and you don't find nuggets 2 miles underground. But they include miles of subterranean passages, with some mines even connected to the neighbouring one.
About 200,000 people work in South Africa's gold mines. And keeping tabs on all the workers all the time is impossible. An experienced miner will know which bits of rock are worth hacking at. Provided he can get in and out with no questions asked, a night's moonlighting can be far more profitable than his day job.
Other parts of the production process are similarly vulnerable, with some machinery regularly collecting small residues of metal. When a company scraps an old processing plant, the costs are often more than covered by the value of the metal recovered from the old machinery.
One energetic gold middle-man kept a diary showing that in a single year he had handled a tonne of gold - 32,151 troy ounces with a market value of $260 an ounce.
The platinum production chain has traditionally been considered less vulnerable than gold, because the metal is not sufficiently concentrated to be really appealing to amateur thieves until the final refinery stage.
But the companies say the syndicates are beginning to focus on earlier stages in the production chain, either because rising metal prices have made it worth setting up bootleg refineries, or because additional security at the official refineries has left them no alternative.
The official refineries, where the pure metal is finally extracted, are the most tempting targets. But, unsurprisingly, they are also the most heavily protected. The holy of holies at the Anglo Platinum refinery is a little room like a heavy-duty larder, containing big bottles of the various platinum group metals in powder form, each one helpfully labelled in case the thief has trouble distinguishing one from another.
The explanation, of course, is that Anglo Platinum is confident no thief will get that far - or could get out again if he did. But earlier this year a truck carrying a full load of platinum ore was hijacked. The value of its cargo made the effort of processing it worthwhile.
The criminal syndicates have developed parallel production chains to turn semi-processed metal into a marketable product. The police know where in the mainly black townships to find the bootleg refineries, but don't bother to close them down, often on the grounds that they would only open up somewhere else, and it is useful to be able to keep an eye on them.
The G-hostel in Thabong township in the Welkom area, thick with gold mines, has been raided many times, arrests made and illegal processing equipment confiscated. But such raids have little effect in checking the theft: less than 1 tonne of gold a year is recovered.
An unpleasant side to this parallel economy is that chemicals used in processing can cause painful death for the thieves if things go wrong.
Workers at the bottom end of the pyramid have traditionally had a high casualty rate. AngloGold, the country's largest gold miner, tells of four thieves who were crushed to death a few years ago when they stopped a mill to collect the accumulated gold dust; the mill had accidentally been turned on again.
But there are signs that in some cases the money men behind the syndicates are beginning to look after their own. One tale tells of some thieves trapped down a gold mine where the company was due to start blasting the rock. Suddenly their lawyer appeared at the pit head threatening murder charges if they were harmed.
Another tells of a poor black worker offered bail on an impossibly large sum. It was paid at once by an unknown"friend", and the thief vanished.
As attacks on the mines have become more sophisticated, so has the defence. Until recently, the precious metals companies concentrated resources on the refineries. But now, the battle begins at the front gate at the Anglo Platinum refinery, where even legitimate visitors are admitted one by one in case they are toting a gun.
More than a 10th of the staff are involved in security. The high-security unit is protected by a double row of 15ft barbed-wire fences with a sterile zone in between - a wide strip of barren ground that is cleared once a year.
The height of the fences and the width of the zone were designed to prevent an employee using a catapult to lob a piece of metal to an accomplice outside.
Another refinery apparently attempted to solve a catapult problem by covering the side of a building abutting a busy road with a thick and seemingly impermeable plastic. However, the plastic soon sprouted small holes; ingenious thieves had discovered that hot metal penetrated the plastic.
In Russia the precious metals refinery is allegedly protected by armed KGB heavies. Does the security system at Anglo Platinum's refinery include anything as crude as guns? Its boss smiles enigmatically."I don't think I'll answer that one. You are, after all, a journalist," he said.
Lonplats, the platinum arm of Lonmin, the rump of Tiny Rowlands' former Lonrho conglomerate, has been forced to improve the security at its own refinery. When checking the figures for its 1998-99 year, it discovered that the amount of unprocessed metal was rising, but the amount of refined metal was falling.
The company has now tightened security right through its production chain. A couple of hundred cameras are monitored by two control rooms - the second one watches the first one.
The mining industry is working with the diamond and gold branch of the South African police to fight the criminals. Until recently they have worked mainly on a local level. But the honeycomb structure of the networks means that even when a particular cell is closed, a new cell opens up elsewhere, and the rest of the syndicate survives untouched.
The Chamber of Mines is now trying a different tack - looking at the international dimension: where the gold is going and who is orchestrating the thefts.
It is comparatively easy to know that gold is stolen if it is recovered inside South Africa. Illegally refined gold usually has a slightly different consistency from that processed by an official refinery. And the industry has developed a sophisticated system for fingerprinting local gold. An expert can tell not just which mine a sample comes from, but also roughly when it was mined.
The snag is that the South Africans do not have a comprehensive library of fingerprints from gold mines in other countries. It has a number of international airports and no one checks the cargo on most small aircraft. Once the metal has left South Africa, it is difficult to prove it is stolen, even if it can be tracked down in the first place.
As yet the score remains: Robbers 35; Cops 1.
Und die Banksters sind da noch nicht mit eingerechnet!!!
Gruss
tofir
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