Editor’s Note
This article details the unexpected seizure of a gold shipment in Miami, revealing the intricate and often opaque pathways of international precious metals trade. The incident underscores the regulatory challenges and geopolitical tensions that can disrupt even the most meticulously planned logistics.
The twin-engine King Air 200 was scheduled to land in Miami at 4:00 PM, in time for its cargo to clear customs, continue its transit on another plane, and arrive in Zurich that same day. The 10 suitcases contained gold valued at over 7 million euros, destined for a complex of gray buildings at the foot of the Alps: one of the world’s largest refineries, the Swiss Argor-Heraeus.
But when the plane from Curaçao, the Dutch Caribbean island 70 kilometers off the Venezuelan coast, landed at Miami airport on March 17, 2015, there was no way it could continue its journey as planned.
wrote the logistics manager for the valuables transport company, Brink’s, to the cargo’s exporting client.
That setback disrupted more than just the flight plan, as that night at customs the gold bars were seized. Officially, the seizure was due to an inconsistency in the documentation. The US agents were trying to understand something more substantial: where did the gold, declared as “scrap,” i.e., recycled material, originating from Curaçao, really come from?
wrote a Brink’s executive in an internal email exchange. At that time, the Venezuelan mining industry was already widely associated with serious human rights violations, environmental crimes, and the involvement of armed groups and criminal networks.
The gold was released two years later after the payment of a $300,000 fine, according to the supplier’s statement in a judicial declaration of a procedure known as “civil forfeiture,” useful for avoiding criminal litigation. Thus, the case was closed without formal charges being filed.
Ten years later, a journalistic collaboration between OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), IrpiMedia, and Armando.info reveals that this shipment was one of many within a gold flow scheme whose source was, at least in part, in the illegal mines in southern Venezuela.
Hundreds of confidential documents, including invoices, bank statements, emails, refining certificates, and judicial declarations, reveal for the first time the operation of a supply chain that, between 2012 and 2018, transported more than 90 tons of Venezuelan gold — with an approximate value of 3 billion dollars — to refineries in Italy, Turkey, and, above all, Switzerland. These refineries, in turn, supply the jewelry sector, but especially large technology companies such as Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia. Gold is, in fact, an essential material for the technology industry: according to the World Gold Council, the electronics sector consumes more than 270 tons per year, more than any other industrial sector.
This journalistic investigation has reconstructed how the gold was sold to European refineries as “scrap gold”: pieces of supposedly old metal such as used jewelry, dental pieces, or old ingots that are melted down to be reused. In practice, that label functioned as a disguise because, once melted, gold loses any visible trace of its origin, allowing metal extracted in areas of violence and environmental destruction to enter the global market as if it were legitimate.
Classifying the metal in this way allows it to avoid stricter controls. Experts warn that this category has become one of the main cracks in the international regulatory system.