Forever a ‘hot’ item as a store of value, the global craving for gold has over time, pushed individuals and groups to extreme and not always legal options to acquire the precious metal. Ruses to possess gold by means other than legitimate ones abound and one can only marvel at what, sometimes, are the extraordinary, even bizarre lengths which the ‘gold-crazy’ are inclin-ed to embrace in pursuit of possession.
Earlier this month – April 8 – the publication, World Asia, reported that the customs authorities in Hong Kong had realised what it described as its largest-ever gold smuggling bust, seizing 146 kilos of precious metal worth some US$10.7 million.
What the authorities appeared to marvel over however, was not the haul itself, but the meticulousness with which the smugglers reportedly approached the ‘packaging’ of the gold for shipping. The report said that the gold was melted and molded into parts like motor cores, screws and gears.
Apparently pleased as punch with its scuttling of the scam, the Hong Kong authorities opted to place its ‘find’ on display at the City’s International Airport before carrying it off to a place of safe keeping.
Hong Kong being one of the largest gold hubs in the world, the airport security authorities are required to be on their ‘p’s and q’s’, particularly with gold prices having recently been on the rise as investors ‘run around’ in search of asset security tools with which to fend off geo-political uncertainty and inflation.
Here in Guyana, while understandably, the volumes of gold circulating here are decidedly smaller, gold-smuggling remains one of the most important ‘engines’ driving the money-laundering trade. The practice is one of the highest money laundering threats in Guyana, the authorities say, never mind the fact that the amounts that are ‘moved,’ mostly across the country’s notoriously porous land borders are relatively small.
With the country’s economy rapidly opening up to investors of one kind of another from across the world, the country’s modest but not insignificant gold-mining sector is beginning to come increasingly into focus as both a legal as well as an illegal entrepreneurial gateway.
What is happening in Hong Kong, on the scale that it is occurring that is, may very soon find its way to Guyana on an equally grand scale.
