It was the mystery of the missing gold - some $15-million worth - and the Mounties were on the case. They descended on the Royal Canadian Mint, seeking a culprit in the touchy tale of 17,500 ounces somehow vanishing from the Crown corporation that refines the stuff.
This week, the RCMP rendered its verdict: No heist. In fact, say third-party experts who also snooped around within the Mint's fortified walls, the explanation is more banal, if no less bewildering: accounting errors and processing losses - gold disappearing on the books and in the chlorination baths.
Some of it may even be recoverable.
That would be good news for the Mint, which faced the humiliation this spring of searching for the equivalent of 41 bars of gold, before calling in police to see if brazen criminals had been at play.
The Harper government is expected in coming weeks to announce the results of recent accounting and technical reports by the third-party experts, after the Office of the Auditor-General approves the Mint's long-delayed 2008 financial statements.
But the broad lines of the reports are already circulating within government circles, with more precise details to be made public in mid-December.
"The Mint has put forth an explanation for where [the largest portion of] the metal is," a government official said yesterday. "It will come from a few different places, some accounting and some processing."
Accounting problems refer to mistakes in the formulas used to measure how much gold enters the Mint, in varying levels of purity, and how much goes out after being refined.
Government officials and experts added that some of the gold was also lost in the refining process, and there were hopes it could be recovered.
At least one company quietly approached the Mint this summer, stating that the chlorination process used at the Ottawa plant is outdated and offering its expertise to get back some of the precious metal.
Given that recent Mint accounting review went back to 2005, there are questions whether the amount of lost gold might be even higher.
The opposition has lambasted the government for the bumbling that surrounded last spring's revelations of missing gold, accusing Ottawa of mishandling the wealth of Canadians.
The Conservative ministers in charge of the Mint, John Baird and Rob Merrifield, responded by criticizing the Crown corporation and freezing executive bonuses while the story subsided.
"The Mint's still unexplained loss of precious metals is inexcusable," the ministers said in a statement last June. "The Mint will be held accountable."
The RCMP this week said it had come up blank after probing security measures and following up on "all investigative leads." In a statement, the Mint added that it will now provide its explanation for the losses as soon as possible.
"The Mint has reviewed physical security, technical processes and prior period accounting with the assistance of external third party experts. These reviews are complete," it said.
The Mint refines more than five million troy ounces of gold a year, brought in as raw metal or scrap jewellery to be turned into 400-ounce gold bars.
Because of the complexities of refining operations, the physical count of gold is rarely exactly what the paper records indicate, but the discrepancies are usually much smaller than the ones announced by the Mint this year.
