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 No explanation was given as to how the counterfeiters obtained the unpublished bar serial numbers, nor the likely benefit of counterfeiting stolen property in this way.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
Patrick Hastings new price. Oppenheimer was the only one with access to the accounting information, and the rest of the company had no way of checking that his figures were correct. In the same time frame, a new deposit of diamonds was discovered in South Africa, forcing the syndicate to acquire several million pounds worth of these new diamonds to prevent their control over the market being destroyed. This strained their finances and the new diamonds forced the price down. To correct this, the syndicate were forced to reduce the flow of diamonds from British Guiana, which they did by getting Oppenheimer