A startup company was outlining its plan to provide independent assessments - the equivalent of "consumer reports" - of the companies that conduct assay tests in the mining industry.

The small room started to fill up as word spread about the person who was going to address the importance of Benchmark Six's service and "due diligence" in the mining industry.

A murmur went through the group as 69-year-old John Felderhof, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt, began to speak. The former Bre-X executive was making his first appearance as a participant at the convention since PDAC named him prospector of the year in March 1997 - the very month that Bre-X began to unravel, and to become synonymous with the biggest gold fraud in history.

Most of the hundreds of mining industry types and media in Toronto last week had no idea Mr. Felderhof was among them. In that crowd he remains, for the most part, a pariah. Jon Baird, president of PDAC, was as surprised as anyone by his presence at the convention by saying: "He was here?"

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But Mr. Felderhof, in an exclusive interview with the National Post, his first since Bre-X imploded almost 13 years ago, said he does not keep a low profile out of guilt. He doesn't think his addressing a crowd of gold miners about the importance of due diligence is ironic, either.

"I am not hiding. I did not do anything wrong," he says. "I am not guilty. I have never been guilty." His innocence is one of the few things surrounding Bre-X of which Mr. Felderhof is certain. He offered his views on many of the mysteries still surrounding one of Canada's biggest business scandals, but on some of the key questions - and in particular on the big one: if he didn't commit the fraud, who did? - he admits he has no answers.

It is why, despite his vindication in court in July 2007, when he was acquitted of all eight insider trading charges under the Ontario Securities Act, John Felderhof, the public face of the Bre-X scandal, is still the man who cannot clear his name.

The story of Bre-X, one of fortunes made and lives lost, has been told before. The tampered samples uncovered at the company's Busang site in Indonesia led to the collapse of the multi-billion-dollar firm. A mining operation with a stock market value of more than $6-billion at its peak was virtually worthless by May 1997, after an independent audit stated that samples at Busang had been tampered with and there was almost no gold at the site.

It was a stain on the Canadian mining industry, with investors large and small losing money as a result of the fraud. The untimely death of Bre-X geologist Michael De Guzman in 1997 and company president David Walsh in 1998 left Mr. Felderhof as the only surviving face of the scandal.

"They had to hang somebody. The whole thing blew up into a lynch mob mentality," Mr. Felderhof told the Post.

Friends say there remains broad-based resistance to portraying Mr. Felderhof as anything but a villain. Mo Srivastava, president of Benchmark Six, who also was retained as a defence expert during the insider trading trial,

called it "an aversion to anything that rocks the Big Bad John story." He also says there is a disconnect between "what is true" and "what people think is true."

The RCMP concluded there was not sufficient evidence to lay criminal charges. The Securities Act offences never alleged that Mr. Felderhof took part in the tampering or even knew about it. Instead, the securities prosecution was about whether he had a legal duty to uncover the fraud. The Securities Act charges, which carried a lower threshold for conviction than a criminal charge, put the onus on Mr. Felderhof to prove that he had acted responsibly and shown due diligence.

In a more than 600-page judgment, Justice Peter Hryn flatly rejected the argument that there were red flags he ought to have seen. Judge Hryn accepted the evidence of the defence experts and, effectively, the proposition that Mr. Felderhof was also a victim of the fraud.

"I was fooled. I believed the whole thing to be true. It looked real. The results were real. I used every top expert in the world. I am still trying to figure it out," Mr. Felderhof told the Post during the interview, which took place at a Toronto law office without his lawyer present. The tampering, he said, was executed expertly. "It was so consistent. It was not just in one direction. It escaped the computer modeling." But the exhaustive if somewhat dry judicial pronouncement by Judge Hyrn, which Mr. Felderhof suggested must be read to have an "intelligent conversation" about Bre-X, has not exonerated him in the minds of his former mining colleagues.

"This is not a legal argument," said Mr. Baird, the president of PDAC, who indicated he had not read Judge Hryn's ruling. "This guy should have known what went on."

That view was echoed by Jean Vavrek, executive director of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. "People have a tough time accepting the judge's ruling," Mr. Vavrek said, adding he had not read it either. "It is hard to believe he didn't know."

Mr. Vavrek also spoke of his respect for Graham Farquharson, who uncovered the fraud in 1997. It was testing by his independent consulting firm Strathcona Mineral Services Ltd. that exposed the tampering of samples in the southeast section of the Busang site.

Mr. Farquharson was also the key witness for the Ontario Securities Commission in its prosecution of Mr. Felderhof.

Judge Hryn was critical of the conclusions and much of the testimony of Mr. Farquharson. The ruling noted that the "red flags" put forward by Stathcona were based on hindsight.

Previous tests by independent companies, visits by analysts and the many companies such as Barrick Gold that were trying to get involved in Busang did not uncover any red flags, the judge noted. During the trial, Barrick chief executive Peter Munk testified that the company used its "A-team" to investigate Busang.

Mr. Farquharson, who was recently inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, told the National Post this week that he stands by his report in 1997 and his testimony at the trial.

"I do not agree with the judge's conclusions. We have not changed our views.

Why are you dragging up this old story?" he asked. The enmity between the two men is still evident.

"Strathcona did not do a proper audit," Mr. Felderhof said, insisting the company overstated the extent of the fraud. "There was a rush to judgment."

Mr. Farquharson calls that "absolute nonsense."

These, then, are the two divergent views of Bre-X and Mr. Felderhof's role in it: He and his few friends in the business say he was a scapegoat; most everyone else says he should have known the fraud was taking place.

For the most part, except when Strathcona was mentioned, Mr. Felderhof was relaxed while talking to the National Post, after a quick lunch of a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and resigned to the difficulty of winning in the court of public opinion.

"I am over that. I don't feel the anger anymore. I wanted to yell to the world. I am not guilty. I have never been guilty. I was prosecuted by the OSC and acquitted. I have been investigated by the SEC, by the RCMP, by private investigators. Where does this stop? I lost my professional career. That is the sad part of it, because I loved what I was doing."

There is still one legal saga remaining, the Bre-X class action lawsuit in which lawyers for the company trustee are trying to seize assets from Mr. Felderhof's ex-wife. "I don't have anything. It was all spent on lawyers," he said with a chuckle.

The Bre-X fraud duped so many sophisticated players in the mining industry that it would seem there could be only a handful of potential suspects.

"Absolutely right. I wish I could give you an answer. It would have made my life easier the past 13 years," Mr. Felderhof said.

Theories about the potential fraudsters have included everyone from lower level employees to the various powerful interests connected to the burgeoning company. Mr. Felderhof did not want to add to the rumour mill, raising his hand to move on to another topic. "You are going in very deep here," he replied.

He would say, though, that former colleague Michael De Guzman, who mysteriously died after falling from a helicopter in March 1997, days after Bre-X learned of poor test results, was not involved in any fraud.

"My gut feeling is he was not, based on what I knew of him and as a person," he said. As well, he does not believe that Mr. De Guzman committed suicide - "You can buy sleeping bills over the counter in Indonesia. Why jump out of a

helicopter?" - yet he declined to discuss whether Mr. De Guzman was murdered. "You are going in deep here," he said again.

He dismissed the notion, floated occasionally, that Mr. De Guzman is still alive and possibly living in Brazil. "I would take the direct route, wouldn't you? I wouldn't fly to Indonesia," he said. "I have seen the photographs [of the body]. He had been attacked by wild pigs. But he was recognizable. It was definitely Michael De Guzman."

Effectively exiled from his life-long profession, Mr. Felderhof visits Canada only occasionally and met up with his family in Nova Scotia before his appearance at the PDAC convention this week.

The more than $80-million he made selling Bre-X shares when the company was the darling of Bay Street is gone, he said, most of it spent on the various legal proceedings. The geologist, who worked extensively in the Pacific Rim throughout his career, now lives with his new wife in the Philippines, where he runs a modest family business. Asked about the rumours that money from the fraud remains, he said simply that he "is struggling."

As for the accusation that follows him still, that because of his position he "should have known" about the fraud, Mr. Felderhof said his role at Busang was overstated.

"A lot of people think I was chief geologist. I was never chief geologist. I wasn't on site [regularly]. I was general manager. I was supervising four drilling projects. If you overlay Indonesia over Canada, it covers Canada from coast to coast. It has four time zones. I was supervising four drill projects. I tried to visit each project every two months." The men who were closely involved with Busang, the chief geologist and the site manager, are somewhere in the Philippines, he said. He doesn't know where. Friends like Mr. Srivastava say that over the years Mr. Felderhof has "mellowed and reached a certain level of acceptance." He has, said Mr. Srivastava, "his health, he has his friends."

Mr. Felderhof said he spent many years and most of his fortune fighting his legal battles in Canada - even though the Canadian government could not have had him extradited on Securities Act charges - for a simple reason. "I could have settled with the OSC. But I am a proud man. I would rather sacrifice everything than sacrifice my name and my family's name. My name is not for sale."

National Post