The acquittal of former Bre-X chief geologist and vice-chairman John Felderhof won't be appealed, the Ontario Securities Commission said Thursday.

The OSC said in a brief statement it had decided not to pursue an appeal "having considered the reasons for decision issued July 31, 2007, by the Honourable Mr. Justice Peter Hryn."

John Felderhof at the Sanur Beach Hotel in Bali in January.
(Associated Press/Firdia Lisnawati)

Hryn acquitted Felderhof of all eight of the Securities Act charges he had faced — four counts of insider trading and four counts of authorizing misleading news releases.

Felderhof sold $84 million worth of Bre-X stock in 1996, just before the company's supposedly rich gold project in Busang, Indonesia, was exposed as a fraud. Investors lost billions.

The OSC alleged Felderhof illegally acted on insider information when he sold the shares. The OSC also accused him of putting his name to news releases the regulator said he should have known were misleading. He denied all the allegations, saying he was taken in like everyone else.

After a trial that dragged on for almost seven years, Hryn ruled in July that Felderhof reasonably believed there was a big gold find at Bre-X and the so-called "red flags" that might have led him to question the reliability of the gold estimates weren't as obvious as the OSC had alleged.

The acquittals were viewed as a major blow to the OSC. Felderhof was the only former Bre-X official to face any kind of legal action arising from the stunning revelation a decade ago that the Bre-X gold find was a hoax.

The RCMP announced years ago it would not lay any criminal charges in the affair, saying there was no likelihood of a conviction.

Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman died mysteriously in March, after apparently committing suicide by jumping from a helicopter into the Indonesian jungle. Bre-X president David Walsh died in 1998 after suffering a brain aneurysm at his home in the Bahamas.