Published 9 August 2021 at 09.05
Economics. A federal jury in Chicago on Wednesday convicted two former bankers at Bank of America and Deutsche Bank respectively for extensive manipulation of the so-called world & shy; market & shy; price of gold, Bloomberg writes.
& nbsp; “It's so easy to manipulate sometimes … I fuck around the market a lot “, boasted one of them in an internal chat.
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Bankers Edward Bases and John Pacilio were sentenced by a federal jury in Chicago on Wednesday for flooding the market with false buy and sell orders for gold, silver and platinum, which the bank placed in order to manipulate metal prices.
Although it is not in itself illegal to suspend orders, the prosecutor said that the banks had deliberately done so to deceive other investors.
& ndash; They did it to make more money on their investments and to skin other investors, prosecutor Scott Armstrong told the jury during the trial.
At Deutsche Bank, Bases is also said to have been responsible for teaching younger managers how to use the bank's huge capital to manipulate precious metal prices. In an internal corporate chat that the prosecutor cited as evidence, Edward Bases brags about how “easy” it is to manipulate the gold price.
“As you can see, it is so easy to manipulate it sometimes,” Bases wrote in a statement to another top manager at Deutsche Bank, Cedric Chanu, shortly after Bases placed an order for 7.7 tonnes of gold worth SEK 2.1 billion with the bank's money.
“I fuck around the market a lot” , Bases further stated in the chat, which was partially reproduced by Bloomberg in July.
While the market reacted to the large order and the price rose, Chanu sneaked into Comex and sold, on behalf of Deutsche Bank, half a tonne of gold for SEK 130 million.
But when only 2 percent of Base's giant orders had been executed he suspended it, and the two trustees secured a huge profit for Deutsche Bank.
It is currently unclear why Comex offers the option to “cancel” orders, which is not normally possible with other types of agreements. However, Comex has long been accused of being more or less a rigged trading venue that allows the largest banks to engage in price manipulation, much like the previous system for the scandalous interest rate Libor. Critics have recently been hit hard.
Chanu and another Deutsche Bank trustee, James Vorley, were sentenced last month to one (1) year in prison for carrying out a similar price manipulation in 2020.
Edward Bases and John Pacilio have been found guilty but by the jury but have not yet had their sentence determined by the judge. The trial against them has taken two weeks.