Santiago, Chile – Documents allegedly showing former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet stashed a huge gold fortune at a bank in Hong Kong have turned out to be forgeries, the Chilean office of HSBC bank said Thursday.
No accounts in Pinochet’s name been found in the bank, HSBC said in a statement.
The bank said it carefully reviewed the documents presented to it by the Chilean State Defense Council, a government agency in charge of defending government interests.
The documents it reviewed suggest that the bank is holding $160 million in Hong Kong under Pinochet’s name.
“HSBC is in a position to confirm that those documents are false,” the statement said.
The announcement by the bank came hours after the Santiago Court of Appeals cleared the way for a probe into the reports that Pinochet had stashed millions of dollars in gold in the Hong Kong bank.
The judge in charge of the investigation, Juan Gonzalez, had even announced he would request information from Hong Kong and suggested a Chilean investigator could travel there.
Pinochet’s lawyer and relatives from the beginning angrily denied that the gold existed.
The 90-year-old former dictator is already the target of a 2-year-old court investigation to determine the source of some $28 million reportedly deposited by Pinochet at various foreign banks.
