Saturday, December 27, 2014

Gold Bars 'Swapped for Painted Lead Bricks' at Ukrainian Bank in Odessa

Gold bars held in a vault at a Ukrainian bank have been swapped for lead bricks covered in golden paint, The Independent is reporting.

The Central Bank in the southern port city of Odessa was allegedly conned into buying the fake bullion by
a member of staff, who used it to conceal the theft of the real bars.

The state’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has announced an investigation into the heist, which could involve up to $420,000 worth.

“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, told Bloomberg News. “We are conducting a forensic audit now.

This scam looks like small operator stuff to me compared to other gold that has disappeared in the country, since the coup took place in Ukraine at the instigation of the US.

RT, for example, has reported:
Ukraine’s Central Bank chief has divulged some shocking intel: its gold stockpile has reached a new nadir - almost zero. Since the beginning of the year, gold reserves have dropped nearly 16-fold, which begs the question, where did all of it go?

"Official statistics of the National Bank show that the amount of gold in the vaults drastically fell, and it is unclear where it went. At the beginning of this month, the volume of gold was about $1 billion, or 8 percent of the total gold reserves,” the head of Ukraine’s National Bank, Valeria Gontareva, said in an interview with Ukraine’s Kharkiv TV. 

As of November 1, the latest available data, foreign currency reserves stood at $12.6 billion, which puts Ukraine’s national gold stockpile at just $123.6 million, ZeroHedge reported. 

However, this figure contradicts the $988.7 million, which is the level gold should stand at, if the ratio of gold to total reserves was 8 percent.


In February, before then-President Vicktor Yanukovich was toppled, gold reserves stood at about 21 tons, according to then chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine Sergey Arbuzov.
Where did the gold go?

21st Century  Wire wrote in March:
  According to reports out of Kiev... the US has quietly transfers 33 tons of Ukrainian gold out of the country and back to vaults in the US. Presumably, this sovereign wealth transfer would be counted as partial “collateral” for a fresh round of IMF, US FED, and ECB paper debt that is currently being organised for dumping into the Ukraine’s economic black hole.

Multiple inquiries to US Federal Reserve administrators into the location of the Ukraine’s gold have been met with the proverbial ‘pass the buck’, making tracking and tracking the final resting place of these 33 tonnes very difficult indeed – but one can expect that the NY Fed is probably the institution who has masterminded this financial heist.  
Note how gold flows into New York, but has difficulty flowing out of US private banking hands as is the case with the ‘confiscation’ of Germany’s gold. Numerous attempts by Bundesbank to repatriate its gold reserves have been met with a brick wall, and to date, Germany has only recovered a miniscule 5 tonnes directly from the NY Fed – out of the total 674 tonnes (an additional 32 tonnes were recovered via French central bank).

It’s worth pointing out here that when NATO sacked Libya in 2011, one of the first items that came into question was the gold in Libya’s state-run central bank. Prior to the NATO takeover of that country, Libya had one of the highest per capita gold reserves in the world, alongside Lebanon, giving Libya a distinct advantage should it carry out former Libyan leader Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi’s long-term financial transition to a gold-backed Libyan Dinar. As you can imagine, this is no longer the case in Tripoli.

 (ht Felix Bronstein)

2 comments:

  1. In my opinion - granted completely uneducated and uninformed - the reason the Germans aren't making a big deal about it (yet) is because they know what is going on. They know the gold is either not there, or has been "loaned out" numerous times simultaneously to different parties. However the Germans have to play along, because if the cat gets let out of the bag, the Euro will utterly collapse. Am I way off base?

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    1. [aka Stargazer] The gold is likely there but has been hypothecated several times over. It would take some time to unwind the trades. Hence, the delay. The German CB knows this since they do the same with the gold stored in Germany. It is a game that will end very, very badly for everyone.

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