1.01 In the goldmines around Johannesburg over 40 tons of gold disappear each year, stolen by workers who often answer to two bosses - the gold mines and the South African mafia. The figures are increasingly alarming:

1.16 Estimates range between 6 to 10 percent of our production that is stolen.

1.20 The mafia uses the gold to launder billions in dirty money with the help of Swiss banks.

1.31 What was created here was a vehicle for people in South Africa or elsewhere in the world to wash their money via gold transports to Switzerland and then clean into Swiss bank account.

1.39 Prominent names in the world of Swiss banking, like UBS, are involved.

1.46 The gold mafia in Johannesburg makes a double profit. First through the stolen gold, and then through money-laundering by means of currency swindles, drug-dealing and other crimes. Despite solving a few cases, the police are gradually losing control. The miners' poverty is the catalyst.

2.04 A lot of the people who actually work on a day to day basis in the mines are very poor. They get very low salaries and anything to help them better their lives and gold is easy. I mean if you take half a teaspoon full of gold you can increase your salary by tenfold.

2.25 Many of the tens of thousands of miners, who labour 2000 metres below ground, are doing the dirty work in a chain of organised crime.

 2.37 Trains take the miners to their place of work five kilometres away. Slowly, the temperature rises to 52 degrees. Often the tunnels are only half a meter high. It's damp, and water floods in all the time.

2.56 People are frequently exposed to deafening levels of noise.

3.01 Little has changed here since apartheid was abolished: the workers are black and their bosses are white. The blacks live in hovels and the whites on the mine grounds on a spruce estate complete with golf course.

3.14 The gold is embedded in the rock, and can rarely be seen with the naked eye.

3.20 It is often stolen in the form of sand, which is then smuggled out of the mine.

3.28 Coming up to the surface, every other miner is frisked by the security guards, hoping to catch the thieves red-handed.

3.42 Security checks like this seldom have the desired effect, since the miners warn each other beforehand.

3.56 How is it possible that so much gold is stolen?

4.02 Due to the fact that it's available all over down there underground and that there's a market for it outside.

4.06 And the problem is growing?

4.08 Every day.

4.10 Gold is also siphoned off around the rock mills. It's also taken as read that some of the security staff are being bribed by the Mafia. The temptation is just too great.

4.24 People that steal know that there will be buyers for their gold, and that is probably why the problem goes to the extent that it is.

4.32 The crude gold ends up in the hands of small middlemen in the townships around Johannesburg .

4.41 As this police video shows, the gold is melted out of the rock in people's backyards, using primitive methods. The poisonous fumes often prove lethal.

4.56 The extracted gold then passes from the black slums to the gold mafia's white buyers in Johannesburg.

5.06 The police secretly filmed this gold handover in a block of flats.

5.15 The money used to pay the gold thieves also comes from drug dealing, often involving the Russian mafia. But how does organised crime manage to get the tons of stolen gold into Switzerland? In South Africa only the National Bank may export gold. In the case of Chemfix, which the police solved after a five year enquiry, seven tons of gold had been exported, disguised as silver.

5.43 It was put in the sealed containers and the documentation fraudulently stipulated that it was in fact silver because they painted the gold silver. And they declared it with customs and excise on the waybills and the export documents, they declared it as silver.

6.04 Officially, Swissair transported silver, not gold, into Switzerland. The transportation documents had also been forged. They clearly stated the goods were silver.

6.14 In Switzerland the recipient of the silver-plated gold was the UBS subsidiary Metalor in Neuenburg. Behind the gold refinery's closed doors the silver was removed from the untreated pieces of South African gold.

6.29 Then standard gold bars were prepared for the world market, the value of which was paid into the mafia's Swiss bank accounts.

6.37 The process had gone full circle, the "dirty"money had been "cleaned". Were Metalor and the banks involved guilty of receiving stolen goods and money-laundering? Had they broken Swiss law?

6.49 UBS, the owner of Metalor, and according to police also the destination of some of the laundered money, sent us a fax claiming that those responsible at Metalor have always acted above board.

7.02 Metalor categorically refused an interview. They preferred to answer our questions in writing. The accusation on money laundering was refuted:

7.11 ''May we remind you that the law against money-laundering has only been in force since the 1st of April 1998. We could therefore hardly obey laws which were unknown to us."

7.24 When gold was delivered camouflaged as silver, shouldn't that have aroused suspicion with the Metalor staff, and should they not in turn have informed the authorities? Metalor's response:

7.32 ''We were in no position to prevent the suppliers from tampering with the goods''.

7.39 and...... 7.40 "These goods were imported and declared as gold"

7.46 This declaration is false, as clearly proven on these documents which state that the goods were silver. The Swiss authorities have been offering their help to the South African police with their law enforcement proceedings.

8.04 It's perfectly clear - what was exported from South Africa was not the same thing that was received on the other side. The question is did they knowingly participate? If they knew or suspected that it was dirty money, and that the whole operation was suspect? The answer is yes!

8.21 Definitely if the company Metalor was situated in South Africa they would have faced serious charges against them.

8.29 Metalor has defended itself in the Federal Appeal Court against South African requests for law enforcement aid. Meanwhile, in South Africa's mines, gold is still disappearing down dubious channels.

ENDS