Being a billionaire certainly has its advantages. You can throw your money around and get what you want, and in the case of leftwing billionaire George Soros, what he wanted was a proposed gold mine killed that would have brought economic prosperity to an impoverished village in Romania. Soros, who has investments in rival gold mining companies, organized opposition to the project via his Open Society Institute in Romania, working hand-in-hand with several non-Romanian NGOs against the project.
If Soros was a rightwing billionaire, his efforts and intervention in this matter would no doubt be scrutinized by the American media and held up as an egregious example of capitalism run amok and of undue Western interference in the affairs of another country.
But Soros is a primary funder of the American Left, and as such his activities get little scrutiny from a politically sympathetic American media. That's a shame. Because the shutdown of Gabriel Resources' mining project in Rosia Montana, Romania, means an immediate loss of hundreds of jobs and a long-term loss of perhaps thousands of jobs created at the mine and spillover economic growth in the impoverished region.
It also means that the existing shuttered mine, an open pit of environmental waste that continues to befoul the region, will not be cleaned up any time soon.
The people of the Rosia Montana region have witnessed the execution of their economic future. The fingerprints of George Soros are all over the gun, but the American media looks the other way.
Good coverage at ResourceInvestor.com and Canada's National Journal.
Last April Soros wrote a private letter to the CEO of Newmont Mining, a company in which he holds a significant stake, and which owns a stake in Gabriel Resources, and urged the Newmont CEO to put pressure on Gabriel Resources to stop the Rosia project. You can see the letter in page 25 of this document.
The demise of the Rosia project has resulted in Gabriel's stock price plummeting. It's down 60 percent since September, and likely to drop further now that Gabriel has official stopped put the mine on hold.
Gabriel owns much of the land necessary for the Rosia project. Considering all of Soros' gold holdings around the world, that declining stock price means it has just become a lot more affordable for Soros to swoop in and take over the Rosia project.
For more on Soros and the Romanian gold mine project - and the liberal media that helped him advance his agenda - see these previous NewsBusters articles:
