There’s a secrecy to the specifics of our planned rendezvous, when I meet a sharp-suited Egon von Greyerz in Zurich airport’s arrivals hall. Hands shaken, he guides us out of a side entrance towards a car park in a quiet corner of the sprawling complex. Roughly 30,000 people work in and around the site; annually, tens of millions of passengers pass through here. Scarce few are aware of the existence, let alone the precise location, of our intended destination: a high-security, 350sqm vault somewhere deep beneath us. Inside it, vast quantities of gold, much of it belonging to von Greyerz, and a roster of his company’s exceedingly wealthy international clientele.
For more than 25 years, von Greyerz has been in this business: buying, selling and storing precious metals for the super-rich, all the while preaching his golden gospel. “We set certain minimum levels,” he says, “to invest through us: $400,000 to store gold in this Zurich vault, or our similar one in Singapore. We use another deep in the Swiss Alps: you’ll need to invest $5m to have anything there.”
