SERABI GOLD: NEW INVESTOR BRINGS PROMISE FOR JUNIOR PRODUCER IN BRAZIL / 3 Geotech_Earlug_2016_Alt2.pdf 1 2016-06-24 4:27:20 PM
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APRIL 16-29, 2018 / VOL. 104 ISSUE 8 / GLOBAL MINING NEWS · SINCE 1915 / $3.99 / WWW.NORTHERNMINER.COM
Cobalt Mining titan and philanthropist Peter Munk’s lifetime of achievement Blockchain tries new TRIBUTE
| Canadian patriot builds Barrick Gold into global powerhouse
BY TRISH SAYWELL tsaywell@northernminer.com
I
t’s an extraordinary story about an extraordinary man who became one of the most legendary entrepreneurs in Canadian history. But at its core it is also a love story. It’s a tale about Peter Munk’s lifelong romance with Canada — the country that welcomed him after he and 14 members of his family fled Hungary and the Nazi’s death camps in the final year of the Second World War. Since then the iconic entrepreneur and founder of gold mining giant Barrick Gold has donated $300 million to institutions in Canada, primarily to healthcare and education in recent years, before his death on March 28, 2018, at age 90. Last November, Munk and his wife Melanie gave $100 million to the Toronto General Hospital’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre — the largest gift to a single Canadian hospital in history. “We’re not talking about charity, we’re not talking about a gift, we’re talking about repaying a debt,” Munk said at the time. “I’m here to thank you ... you guys who were born here, who take it for granted, will never appreciate the immense debt I have.” Munk was 16 years old when the Nazis marched into Budapest in the spring of 1944. “The Munks were an upper middle class, well-to-do Jewish family,” Munk told CBC’s Susan Ormiston in an interview in 2007. “Budapest was full of Jews, very assimilated
model in DRC COBALT
| Junior to ‘ethically source’ cobalt using blockchain technology BY RICHARD QUARISA
C Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk addresses shareholders at the 2010 annual general meeting. BARRICK GOLD
— the Austral-Hungarian Empire liked them.” Under the command of SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, the Germans began to round up Jews, forcing them into ghettos and then into cattle cars that would take them to Auschwitz, an extermination camp in Poland. Before the Germans surrendered to the Allies in May 1945, they had deported more than 425,000 Hungarian Jews and murdered most of them. The Munks and thousands of others owe their lives to Rezso Kasztner, a Zionist lawyer and journalist who negotiated with Eichmann and another SS officer, Kurt Andreas Becher, to save as many of his people
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as he could from the Nazi’s gas chambers. “I first heard of Rezso Kasztner in 1999 from Peter Munk,” writes Anna Porter, author of Kasztner’s train: The true story of Rezso Kasztner, unknown hero of the holocaust. It was late in the war and there were officers in the SS who were prepared to trade Jewish lives for goods, jewels and cash — preferably Swiss francs. Porter’s book chronicles how Kasztner kept 20,000 Hungarian Jews alive for a deposit of $100 a head (“Eichmann called them ‘Kasztner’s Jews’ or ‘the Jews on ice,’” she writes). He also helped prepare fake identity papers for countless others, and organized a train that would take 1,684 Jews to a safe country. The Munks were on that train. “We did not know where the train was going,” Olga Munk, Peter’s mother-in-law, told Porter in an interview, adding that they had “no idea if we would be alive at the end of the journey. “But we were absolutely certain we would not live to see the end of the war if we stayed in Budapest.” The train’s passengers, Porter wrote, included “industrialists, intellectuals and Orthodox rabbis, Zionists and anti-Zionists, Polish and Slovak refugees from pogroms and concentration camps, the oldest 85, the youngest a month old. The wealthy Jews of Budapest
paid an average US$1,500 for each family member to be included. The poor paid nothing.” The train left Budapest on July 1, 1944, and arrived at Bergen-Belsen — one of the Nazi’s concentration camps northeast of Hanover, Germany — on July 9, where the passengers disembarked and stayed for weeks while Kasztner bargained for their freedom. From there, the train took them in two groups to Switzerland. Munk’s group arrived on Aug. 21, the second group on Dec. 21. After the war, Kasztner moved to Israel, where he was accused by an Israeli trial judge in 1955 of collaborating with the Nazis. The judge declared Kasztner had “sold his soul to the devil.” “Utter nonsense, utter nonsense, utter, total nonsense,” Munk told CBC. “He was a hero ... probably the equivalent of a biblical hero. “How do you thank someone who saved your life, your father’s life and your grandfather’s life?” Kasztner was assassinated in 1957. The three assailants were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. A week later, the Supreme Court exonerated Kasztner in a four-to-one decision. They ruled, Porter said, that he “had acted in what he believed to be in the best interests of all the people, not only those he had
rquarisa@northernminer.com
obalt Blockchain (TSXV: COBC) is trying something new. The company wants to “ethically source” artisanally mined cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and at the same time implement a blockchainbased technology that would track the metal as it moves through the supply chain. In March the company acquired two copper-cobalt properties in the DRC via two joint-venture (JV) agreements with what it calls “local private partners.” It has a 70% interest in the Alpha Cobalt See COBALT BLOCKCHAIN / 6 PM40069240
See PETER MUNK / 2
PERSHING GOLD: KEEPS EXPLORING RELIEF CANYON IN NEVADA / 7
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