Eccentric Russian businessman leads return to gold standard

German Sterligov, the Russian millionaire who emerged from a hermit-like existence to fight the global economic crisis, is moving forward with his efforts, BFM.ru reports. His initial ideas about returning to a system of natural exchange have developed into a plan to create an exchange system based on gold.

Last October, Sterligov set up his ASCENT (Anticrisis Settlement & Commodity Centre), “a global system of countertrade and debt settlement,” according to the center’s website, using €15 million that Sterligov claims to have been keeping under an oak tree. Now the center is issuing gold coins as “internal payment units.”

The coins are made of 999.9 fine gold and weigh one troy ounce. A small lot of the coins was minted in Kostroma, but large-scale minting will take place in Great Britain or Colombia for legal reasons. A tender for their production has already been announced.

According to BFM.ru, Sterligov and his investors have a pool of about 375 tons of gold, worth almost $12 billion, in London alone. ASCENT has offices in London, Hong Kong, Moscow, Dubai, Kiev, Almaty and Kabul and it operates in 17 countries.

The gold coins will not go into actual circulation. They will be kept by a Swiss firm and, as transactions take place among ASCENT clients, ownership of the gold will be tracked with modern technology. The fact that the coins are used for internal settlement is important, since ASCENT has no right to issue a new form of money. Sterligov compared the coins to “tokens” in his interview with BFM.ru. Analysts note that, in Russia, the ownership of gold is permitted, but the use of surrogates for the ruble is not.

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http://www.mosnews.com/money/2009/07/02/sterligold/