Ukraine Central Bank Conned Into Swapping Its Gold For Lead Bricks
12/22/2014 zerohedge.com
Just when one thought the story of Ukraine and its (now non-existant) gold could not get any more surreal, it did.
As a reminder, it was about a month ago when we learned courtesy of an interview on Ukraine TV with the country’s central bank head Valeriya Gontareva, that Ukraine’s gold was virtually all gone, when she made the stunning admission that “in the vaults of the central bank there is almost no gold left. There is a small amount of gold bullion left, but it’s just 1% of reserves.”
That in itself would have been sufficient to explain why just a few short days later, the Netherlands shocked the world when it announced it had secretly repatriated 122 tonnes of gold from the NY Fed, and had the story of Ukraine’s missing gold ended there (or even with the criminal probe launched by Ukraine whether the central bank head had abused her power and misused her office when she “intentionally committed an extremely unfavorable transaction for the gold and forex reserves of Ukraine”), it still would have been one of the most bizarre, surreal stories of 2014.
Luckily, the story just got far better, and far, far more bizarre and surreal.
As Bloomberg reports, Ukraine opened a criminal probe after several gold bars at the central bank’s storage in the southern city of Odessa turned to be painted lead.
“The management of the central bank’s branch in Odessa asked us to investigate fraud by their employee,” Volodymyr Shablienko, head of the Odessa police’s press office, said by phone today. “We are conducting a forensic audit now.”
As Bloomberg explains, the latest gold fraud involved a central bank employee passing lead bars covered with golden paint to the storage unit, registering them as gold, the Vesti newspaper reported today, citing an unidentified person with knowledge of the matter in Odessa’s police department.
According to additional information from RT, the central bank was actually conned into buying the gold-plated lead.
Yes lead, not even tungsten.
RT adds that the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has confirmed the theft of several kilograms of gold in the Odessa region. The cashier involved has apparently fled to Crimea, Vesti Ukraine reports. Criminal proceedings began on November 18, even though the scam apparently took place between August and October.
In other words, when Ukraine still, allegedly, had some gold left. Now it has no more gold, but at least it has some very expensive lead.
A preliminary investigation suggests the gang had someone working for them inside the bank that forged the necessary paperwork to allow the sale of the fake gold bullion. It’s also been discovered that bank staff were not regularly checked when entering or exiting the premises.
Altogether some 11 kilograms of gold worth about $420,000 are missing.
And while one can laugh at the stupidity of a central bank duped into believing gold-plated lead is the real deal, the real stunner is that according to the First Deputy Central Bank Governor Oleksandr Pysaruk, the central bank “took a principal decision that we will not buy gold any more from the population. We are making conclusions internally, including changing our procedures.”
In other words, until December, the central bank would buy any gold-plated lead, or tungsten, without any authenticity tests from any member of the population, or in other words, exchanging its existing reserves, i.e., gold (which it no longer has after converting most of it into dollars), into lead.
There is a potential silver lining here in that whoever ended up getting the bulk of Ukraine’s gold reserves, is now also the proud owner of a few hundreds kilograms of gold-plated lead.
One really couldn’t make this up, which is perhaps the point. Better for the public to be focused on the stupidity of its central bankers, than on their criminality for selling out the people’s gold (or worse, giving it away for free in exchange for political favors of the current class of US State Department muppets) to unknown buyers in exchange for a few pieces of green paper.
h/t Marco
End.
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$300,000 in gold missing from Ukraine Central Bank after swapped for lead bricks
Cunning fraudsters have conned the Ukraine Central Bank branch in Odessa into buying $300,000 worth of gold which turned out to be lead daubed with gold paint.
“A criminal case has been opened and we are now carrying out an investigation to identify those involved in the crime,” a spokesman for the Odessa police force is quoted by Vesti.
The news was first reported by Odessa’s State Ministry of Internal Affairs.
READ MORE: Where has all Ukraine’s gold gone?
A preliminary investigation suggests the gang had someone working for them inside the bank that forged the necessary paperwork to allow the sale of the fake gold bullion. It’s also been discovered that bank staff were not regularly checked when entering or exiting the premises.
Since the discovery, the National Bank no longer buys precious metal over the counter, as it cannot be sure of its authenticity, says the First Deputy Head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Aleksandr Pisaruk.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has confirmed the theft of several kilograms of gold in the Odessa region. The cashier involved has apparently fled to Crimea, Vesti Ukraine reports. Criminal proceedings began on November 18, even though the scam apparently took place between August and October.
In November, the Central Bank reportedly lost $12.6 billion in gold reserves, putting the total stockpile at just over $120 million.
However, the Central Bank reports that foreign currency and gold reserves stood at $9.97 billion at the end of November.
End.
Now Look At U.S. Government Crime
Wait!
The list is too long for even a volume of books, so we highlight a few of the current major crimes:
Meet Your Newest Legislator: Citigroup
Citigroup is the Wall Street mega-bank that forced the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999; blew itself up as a result of the repeal in 2008; was propped back up with the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world even though it was insolvent and didn’t qualify for a bailout; has now written its own legislation to deregulate itself; got the president of the United States to lobby for its passage; and received an up vote from both houses of Congress in less than a week.
And there is one more thing you should know at the outset about Citigroup: It didn’t just have a hand in bringing the country to its knees in 2008; it was a key participant in the 1929 collapse under the moniker National City Bank. Both the U.S. Senate’s investigation of the collapse of the financial system in 1929 and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that investigated the 2008 collapse cited this bank as a key culprit.
Source: http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/12/meet-your-newest-legislator-citigroup/
End.
No price discovery, just misinformation
There’s no price discovery in markets anymore because they’re so manipulated, Sprott Asset Management’s John Embry tells King World News today, adding that the mainstream news media are full of financial misinformation:
There is no real price discovery going on in any markets any more — it’s all being so wildly manipulated. And there is so much misinformation coming out of the mainstream media…
Here is one classic example: An individual from CIBC World Markets said, ‘There’s global demand for high yielding, high quality assets, and the only one that’s in the game is the U.S. bond.
People continue to undervalue it.’I think this will be seen in the fullness of time as one of the most absurd statements ever recorded.
The U.S. is by far the world’s largest debtor, and the fact that it still retains its world reserve currency status is the primary reason that its paper retains any value whatsoever at this point.
So what we’re faced with right now is this recurring propaganda that is being reported in the United States that the U.S. economy is growing strongly and that job creation is robust. What utter rubbish.
Everything is being falsified to keep this myth alive and keep the U.S. dollar and the bond market afloat.” –KWN
End.
.
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This reminds me of Alice in Wonderland where they were busy painting the white roses red. Here they painted the lead bars gold.
Leslie
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LOL
It is a Fantasy with central banking gold reserves.
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I wonder how many other countries are doing this?
Leslie
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You, me, and most of the world have the same question.
No accident, it is policy, that the Federal Reserve refuse to disclose to the public a transparent audit and assay of gold reserves.
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That says a lot in itself. We know where they stand on that issue.
Leslie
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