pitw wrote:I'm watching the Kijiji ads for a good deal.
all kidding aside, I been thinking about this for a spell.
googled, and the same details, or lack of, over and over.
details- stolen 1997 truck, even the license plates, the seacon, with the name of the largest seacon shipping company.
truck and seacon found empty on side street, no mention of distance to port of side street, but undoubtedly a side street with no cams.
two pictures, one, the empty truck going in, the truck with seacon going out. one detail, 350 cams on the port facility.
the amount, basically 520,000 toz, "valued" at 7.5 mln USD, which in the whole scheme of things is peanuts.
now ASSUMING the Ag was in wholesale 1000 toz "loaves, palletized, polywrapped and strapped, 20 to a pallet, which would be 4 layers of 5 loaves, that would make 26 pallets. one single pallet loader and driver could transfer those 26 pallets in what?....35 to 45 minutes tops?...into another seacon onto a "clean" truck.....they might have even done this, INSIDE, then both trucks come out, ditch the dirty rig, and with a another manifest drove right back into the port, offloaded onto another vessel, which was probably out to sea, for parts unknown, before port authorities even reported the theft.
I think the original shipper of the Ag was the culprit, and not the fabricator company per se, but a high placed individual or two, and since the load was insured, the insurance company will pay...in this case, my guess is that the buyer was the Royal Canadian Mint, (IF they also fabricate their own blanks) and as i'm sure we're aware of, due to extraordinary demand, the RCM isn't allocating Maples right this second, so it would be the seller that gets the insurance money, although that is a secondary issue. Sure the insurance companies will send their "detectives" to poke around...maybe Interpol will get interested....eventually.
but the important question is WHY?....why would either individuals or companies risk their freedom to steal a measly 7.5 mln USD of Ag? Because that, along with every screwed up thing in this world now, is the "new normal".
I smell Mexico. oh yeh. Huge producer of Ag, and how long now have mining co's been producing and selling UNDER the cost of production?......and this market dichotomy only exists because the pricing mechanism, the "board" has been so manipulated, as to totally destroy the concept of free market price discovery.
Now if WE, just regular guys, know how valuable stacking Ag is, you don't think the guys that own these mines, and smelters, and are doing this business LARGE SCALE know as well?.....and put yourself in their position. I know I would going nuclear every time I walked into my office to face yet another of day losing BIG MONEY, because a bunch of Yankee and Brit bankers slam the futures markets, on the product my company digs out of the ground, at great expense....my expense, my money.
and when we talk about Mexico, you talk about a nation, that must be absolute hell. God have mercy, organized crime in Mexico, makes the Italian mafia look like a bunch of panty waist nancy boys. they got no mercy, no conscious down there, you mess with them, they'll cut your grandmothers head off, and leave it on the main drag....and that's just the appetizer part of the meal.
going back to my original theory, lets try and poke some holes, was there anybody on the inside at the Port? Why would there have to be? As long as your manifest is clean, you think the "Sgt Schultz" at the main gate is going to hard eyeball one manifest out of thousands of seacons he sees each day?...even if it is a load of Ag?......that said, i'm SURE the security levels on transferring Au is an entirely different, more amped up ball of wax.
now in any rip off crime, the potential hole, is the soldiers you hire to do the actual crime. They could get caught, sweated and sing, but that's why I smell Mexico. Any "made guy" knows he could get whacked, its figured into his personal risk/reward ratio, but that's the difference between say the old skool Italian/Sicilian mafia and the Mexicans. Italians regard family as "civilians", untouchable, in Mexico, as I wrote earlier, there is no such restraint, and any "soldier" within these organizations, is well aware of this, and any man, or most men, who have wives, children, parents, would rather just do their time, then "rat", and have the knowledge that their betrayal, will result in the most painful hideous deaths of the ones they love the most.
so the next time we gaze so fondly on those Maples, or bars, rounds, whatever, in the peace and tranquility of our homes, think about the backstory. That's why I admonish, don't "worship" that shiny coin, because if you do, it becomes an idol. Stack, yes, worship, no.
one last note, this incident definitely shows us all, how dramatically and artificially underpriced Ag really is, that now, at the wholesale level, we see such tom chicanery....wonder how long these 520,000 toz of Ag will float around on the seas?