OTTAWA, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- The $17 million in gold missing from the Royal Canadian Mint in Ottawa wasn't stolen but lost in small amounts sold off as byproduct metal slag, officials said.
For 14 months, the mint, external auditors and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been investigating how the equivalent of 44 gold bars went missing, the Globe and Mail reported Tuesday.
"We can account for all of it -- there was no theft," mint spokeswoman Christine Aquino said. "We used more gold than we thought in the processing."
The report said that created a windfall for the U.S. processors who purchased the mint's slag, or waste left after refining.
In a statement, mint board Chairman James Love said among the changes being made is that slag processing will now be done in-house, annual physical inventories will be doubled to four times a year and a new position will be created whose sole job is inventory control and monitoring.
When the shortage was made public, the government ordered discretionary bonuses for the mint's top five executives for the year be forfeited for 2008.
