SANTO DOMINGO.- “Forget warnings from the IMF, the OECD and George Soros. You know your currency is well and truly down the swanny when even drug dealers are refusing payment in it,” reads the caption under a telegraph.co.uk headline today, in which cites Dominican Republic as an ever growing drug trafficking “hub.”

It also cites Rob Kirby, forensic analyst at Kirby Analytics in a report entitled US Gold, Going, or Completely Gone? It says almost 3,000 metric tons of "very suspicious" gold compounds were exported from the US in 2008. “Paul Mylchreest, of the Thunder Road Report, notes that a very suspicious 174 tons of gold compounds were exported to the Dominican Republic – that well known hub of the world gold trade."

Telegraph.co.uk, adding sarcasm to question such an unusual amount of gold shipped to the small Caribbean nation, also quotes the review Richard Long: Heaven and Earth at Tate Britain, "Maybe these gold compounds really are used in gold paint and that artist who normally puts colourful tarpaulins around islands and buildings has painted the whole of the Dominican Republic gold," Mylchreest ponders. "I'll go and check Google Earth."

“But, he reckons the transformation of the Dominican Republic into a key staging post in the cocaine trade between South America and the US, is a far more likely,” a statement which agrees with affirmations by the Dominican government’s Advisor on Drugs, Marino Vinicio Castillo, on the traffickers’ growing use of the country as a bridge to ship narcotics to the U.S. and Europe.

Relaed article: www2.dominicantoday.com/dr/local/2008/5/2/27847/Reuters-report-Smugglers-fly-with-impunity-in-Dominican-airspace