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Paging Michael de Guzman.
If you are still around, living
grandly with your illicitly obtained wealth under an assumed name as
the grapevine says you do, lend me your ears. The non-OPEC world,
battered by daily surges in oil prices, badly needs you.
We can expunge your guilt,
welcome you back into the mainstream and forget all about your
world-class indiscretions on one condition: do something for the
oil-consuming countries now at the mercy of the OPEC.
This is what you need to do for
the major oil-consuming countries, your native Philippines included.
Using all the guile and the
techniques you mastered at Bre-X, you have to draw a new geological
map with amazing findings of massive oil deposits all across the
globe. Then, prepare the groundwork for a massive media hype.
Proclaim that there is indeed a
massive but untapped oil deposit in Brazil, with oil reserves
topping the reserves of the entire Middle East. Then draw up a
scenario which would place Indonesia, where you built the entire
hoax of Bre-X, back into the oil map. Just say that according to
studies, Indonesia still has untapped oil deposits that are enough
to sustain the world’s fossil fuel needs within the next 50 years.
You can take liberty with the
Philippine geological map. Turn the flimsiest evidence of oil
presence into the oil find of the century.
Craft a paper that says there are
new oil sources in the tropics and in the arctic. Don’t be
hamstrung by facts. You had a history of doing away with them.
We want you to mastermind another
hoax—impressing upon the OPEC that untapped oil is aplenty so they
will be forced to lower their prices. But that will be for a noble,
global cause.
Those clueless on who Michael de
Guzman is, here is the backgrounder.
Michael de Guzman was the
Filipino geologist at the employ of Bre-X, a Canada-based mining
speculator, who announced to the world some 11 years ago, that the
jungles of Busang, in Kalimantan, Indonesia, contained the largest,
untapped gold deposit on planet Earth.
As the public face of Bre-X, de
Guzman backed up his claim with technical data and massive
geological literature so seemingly credible that he took the mining
world by a storm. He presented salted samples to back up his
gold-rich thesis.
The mining and financial
communities lapped up at his every word and proclamation. He was,
after all, a trained geologist. From his jungle base, he spun a tale
of gold and riches of wondrous magnitude.
He proclaimed, using geological
mumbo-jumbo, that the Bre-X mining claims held the “largest
untapped motherload of limitless gold.”
The result was incredible for Bre-X.
The penny stock of the mining speculator soared to $268 per share in
the Canadian stock market, reaping impossible riches for the
Canadian owners and de Guzman himself.
It was after an amazing run that
Bre-X and the “gold find of the century” was exposed as a hoax.
News reports said that de Guzman jumped off a chopper into the
jungle vastness of Busang, Indonesia, four days before the exposé.
Nothing was heard from de Guzman again after the supposed chopper
fall and the burial of a decomposed body, though the mining
grapevine is abuzz with reports that he is still very much alive and
living in style.
De Guzman, who had four wives,
was estimated to be worth $30 million, all from his Bre-X con work.
In our current state of
desperation, haunted by the grim scenario that gasoline prices may
soar beyond P60 per liter within the next few days, there is nothing
wrong in countering the OPEC with a Bre-X type of hoax. This is the
only way to put sense into the OPEC, which has been a spoiled brat
of late, dictating upon the world the ruinous price of its fossil
fuel.
It does not matter that the Bre-X
strategy was reprehensible. And de Guzman masterminded the gold hoax
of the 20th century. In dealing with the OPEC, it should be tit for
tat. Spoiled OPEC, acting irrationally and whimsically, should be
told that there are oil sources other than their fields, and the
oil-consuming world is no longer at their mercy.
Only the realization that oil can
be sourced from elsewhere would push the OPEC into lowering its
prices. Never mind the means, which can be justified by the end.
After all, all is fair in a world
of diminishing oil resources.
mvrong@yahoo.com
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