Brink's-Mat robbery bullion bars bearing the refiner's mark and serial numbers of bars stolen in the Brink's-Mat robbery. According to the police spokesman, the bars were gold-coated tungsten counterfeits, and therefore could not be Johnson Matthey's stolen gold bars. He said that the arrested men planned to fraudulently claim they were from the Heathrow robbery. No explanation was given as to how the counterfeiters obtained the unpublished bar serial numbers, nor the likely benefit of counterfeiting stolen property in this way. A person named Gordon Parry laundered large amounts of cash from the robbery after the disposal of the gold according to
Brink's-Mat robbery never been recovered and the other four robbers were never convicted. In 1996 about half of the gold, the portion which had been smelted, was thought to have found its way back into the legitimate gold market, including the reserves of the true owners, Johnson Matthey. According to the BBC, some have claimed that anyone wearing gold jewellery bought in the UK after 1983 is probably wearing Brink's-Mat. On 21 December 1983, less than four weeks after the robbery, police in Austria arrested five men – four Italians and an Austrian – at a Vienna hotel. Police also recovered ten