Trafigura, one of the biggest traders, is expected to make a record profit in the first quarter of its 2022-2023 financial year, according to indiscretions obtained by Reuters, with the trader itself not publishing quarterly results. These results are all the more important as they include the money lost by the company as part of a gigantic nickel fraud.
$577 million is the money Trafigura may have lost through its nickel trading business. The fraud is said to relate to more than 1,100 containers purchased from companies linked to an Indian businessman, Prateek Gupta. The trading giant began to have suspicions in October 2022, but it discovered the scale of the fraud during the Christmas holidays, during an inspection by its agents carried out at the port of Rotterdam. At least 156 containers were found to be empty. Others were filled with lesser quality nickel, or plain steel. At 30,000 dollars per ton of nickel, if we refer to the fall of 2022, the financial damage is necessarily substantial.
Misauthenticated shipments
This type of fraud has been made possible by a common practice, namely the purchase and resale of a raw material while it is traveling on the oceans. Trafigura specifies that in this specific case, it was a purchase and resale operation, later, at a higher price, but to the same partner. This is equivalent to lending him money, but it does not change the fact that the shipments must be secured.
At this point, the ongoing forensic investigation revealed that Trafigura purchased the nickel without the required authentication documents or with incorrectly marked documents.
Gel des avoirs de Prateek Gupta
While waiting to determine the responsibility of each other, justice has decided to temporarily freeze the assets – ie 625 million dollars – of Prateek Gupta and the seven companies linked to him in this case. Companies based in the UK, Singapore, Malaysia and Switzerland.
The Geneva company, which launched an internal audit to identify flaws, said it wanted to review its control procedures. This fraud should in any case not shake its financial balance: the trader made a profit of 7 billion dollars in 2022, twice as much as in 2021.
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