Secret £1.55bn gold pile backs new trading funds

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Times
By Patrick Hosking, Investment Editor



ONE of the largest hoards of gold ever gathered outside a central bank has been accumulated at a secret address in London over the past few months.

Gold bars with a value of £1.55 billion are understood to have been collected in a single vault in an anonymous building owned by HSBC. If melted into a single block, the 212 tonnes of solid gold would take up 11 cubic metres — roughly the size of a Transit Van.

But the gold is so dense that it would require 104 Transit Vans to cart it away. The quantity of metal is 21 times the amount stolen in the Brinks-Mat robbery in 1983.

Ironically, the reason for the accumulation of this hoard is the popularity of a new gold investment product that does away with the expense, risk and hassle of taking delivery of the metal.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1460595,00.html