Sprott Asset Management founder and philanthropist Eric Sprott, honored last night in Toronto at a retirement testimonial dinner sponsored by the company, praised GATA's work and called on GATA Chairman Bill Murphy and your secretary/treasurer to stand and be recognized. Some people in the audience of about 200 actually applauded, through the audience consisted mainly of ordinarily respectable people from the Canadian financial industry. Of course they may have just been trying to be polite and to humor Sprott. But some later confessed to following GATA's work and to have been persuaded by it.
Sprott went on mischievously to contrast what he called "the GATA table," at which Murphy and your secretary/treasurer were seated with Sprott Asset Management's John Embry and economist Ian Gordon of Longwave Group, with what he called "the World Gold Council table," at which two former chairmen of the council were seated: Franco-Nevada founder Pierre Lassonde and Goldcorp Chairman Ian Telfer. Sprott noted that during the dinner no rolls had been thrown from the GATA table toward the World Gold Council table.
Civility and cordiality were maintained though Lassonde repeatedly has dismissed complaints of gold market manipulation and has insisted that central banks couldn't care less about gold --
http://www.gata.org/node/13105
-- while GATA has dismissed the World Gold Council as an accomplice with central banks in gold price suppression, a facilitator of "paper gold" and the shorting of the monetary metal.
