The story is a window into South Africa’s illegal precious-metals trade, worth as much as $1.3bn a year, spanning poor immigrants, mine employees, metal dealers, makeshift refineries and criminal gangs. The concoction of corruption and poverty that encourages men to mine illegally is spreading the problem from abandoned mines to working ones, threatening the operations of a 120-year-old industry that has produced a third of all the world’s gold. One success was the sentencing of 10 members of a gang to serve a combined 115 years in prison for charges including trading unwrought gold and money-laundering, according to court documents.
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