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At least three banks seen central to LIBOR rigging
By Carrick Mollenkamp and Emily Flitter
Reuters
Saturday, July 28, 2012
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/28/us-banking-libor-traders-idUSB...
New details from court documents and sources close to the Libor scandal investigation suggest that groups of traders working at three major European banks were heavily involved in rigging global benchmark interest rates.
Some of those traders, including one who used to work at Barclays Plc in New York, still have senior positions on Wall Street trading desks.
Until now most of the attention has involved traders at Barclays, which last month reached a $453 million settlement with U.S. and UK authorities for its role in the manipulation of rates. Now it is becoming clear that traders from at least two other banks -- UK-based Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Switzerland's UBS AG -- played a central role.
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Sona Discovers Potential High-Grade Gold Mineralization
at Blackdome in British Columbia -- 13.6g over 1.5 Meters
From a Company Press Release
November 22, 2011
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- With its latest surface diamond drilling program at its 100-percent-owned, formerly producing Blackdome gold mine in southern British Columbia, Sona Resources Corp. has discovered a potentially high-grade gold-mineralized area, with one hole intersecting 13.6 grams of gold in 1.5 meters of core drilling.
"We intersected a promising new mineralized zone, and we feel optimistic about the assay results," says Sona's president and CEO, John P. Thompson. "We have undertaken an aggressive exploration program that has tested a number of target zones. Our discovery of this new gold-bearing structure is significant, and it represents a positive development for the company."
Sona aims to bring its permitted Blackdome mill back into production over the next year and a half, at a rate of 200 tonnes per day, with feed from the formerly producing Blackdome mine and the nearby Elizabeth gold deposit property. A positive preliminary economic assessment by Micon International Ltd., based on a gold price of $950 per ounce over eight years, has estimated a cash cost of $208 per tonne milled, or $686 per gold ounce recovered.
For the company's complete press release, please visit:
http://www.sonaresources.com/_resources/news/SONA_NR18_2011-opt.pdf
Among them the three banks employed more than a dozen traders who sought to influence rates in either dollar, euro, or yen rates. Some of the traders who are being probed have worked for several banks under scrutiny, raising the possibility that the rate fixing became more ingrained as traders changed jobs.
The documents reviewed by Reuters in analyzing the traders' involvement included court filings by Canadian regulators who have been investigating potential antitrust issues; settlement documents with Barclays filed by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington and by the Financial Services Authority in the U.K.; and a private employment lawsuit filed by a former RBS trader in Singapore's High Court.
The scandal, which began to come to light in 2008, has become a time bomb for regulators and a big focus for politicians on both sides of the Atlantic. At issue is the manipulation between at least 2005 and 2009 of rates that are used to determine the cost of trillions of dollars of borrowings, including everything from home loans to credit card rates.
One former Barclays employee under scrutiny, Reuters has learned, is Jay V. Merchant, according to people familiar with the situation. Merchant, who oversaw the U.S. dollar swaps trading desk at Barclays in New York, worked for the bank from March 2006 to October 2009, according to employment records maintained by the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
Merchant currently holds a similar position at UBS, where he works out of the Swiss bank's offices in Stamford, Connecticut, according to FINRA. He did not return requests for comment.
People familiar with the investigation said authorities are looking at whether some individuals on Merchant's trading desk tried to influence the rate on Libor by communicating with other traders in London to get a higher return on certain swaps the desk was trading. His specific role is unclear.
The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Merchant's attorney, John Kenney of Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, did not respond to requests seeking comment.
A UBS spokeswoman said that the bank has "no reason to believe Mr. Merchant has engaged in any improper conduct at UBS." The spokeswoman, who noted that Merchant is on a two-week vacation, declined to comment on the broader investigation.
Barclays declined to comment. In a statement, an RBS spokeswoman said the bank is cooperating with the investigation.
This week Reuters reported that federal prosecutors in Washington have begun reaching out to lawyers for some of the individuals under scrutiny as they get closer to bringing possible criminal charges.
The dollar and euro rate rigging appears to have begun in earnest in early 2005 in the dollar market, according to the documents reviewed by Reuters. By August of that year Barclays traders were reaching out to traders at other big global banks to manipulate their rates to make them favorable to Barclays' trading positions.
Soon the trading had crossed to the euro rate markets, according to the settlement documents filed in the Barclays investigation. And by 2007 traders at RBS and UBS were seeking to influence the yen rate market, according to documents filed in 2011 in Singapore's High Court and in Canada's Ontario Superior Court.
Traders at Barclays are believed to have participated in manipulating the rate for the dollar and the rate for the euro known as Euribor, according to documents filed in the Barclays settlement last month.
RBS and UBS traders are a focus of the global investigation because of their alleged involvement in seeking to influence yen-denominated rates.
Two RBS traders in London, Brent Davies and Will Hall, are alleged to have agreed to help a trader at UBS, Thomas Hayes, to manipulate yen Libor, according to court documents filed by the Canadian Competition Bureau.
UBS is cooperating with Canadian and U.S. authorities, according to people familiar with the situation.
Hayes worked at UBS from 2006 to 2009. He later moved to Citigroup where he remained until 2010, after which he left the bank. Hayes, Davies and Hall could not be reached for comment.
The documents reveal that Hayes also contacted traders at other banks in London to get them to manipulate yen rates. They include Peter O'Leary at HSBC Holdings Plc, Guillaume Adolph at Deutsche, and Paul Glands at JPMorgan. A second UBS employee sought to get a Citigroup trader, who formerly had worked at UBS, to influence rates.
None of these traders could be reached for comment.
In addition, a former trader at RBS, Tan Chi Min, said in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed in the Singapore High Court in 2011 that he was forced out for "improperly seeking to influence" the setting of Libor. Tan, who ran a trading desk at RBS, said in the suit that improper rate-rigging was known by some at the bank and condoned.
Tan denied trying to manipulate Libor, and alleged in the 2011 court filing, and one in March this year, that about a half dozen other RBS traders openly tried to request specific rates.
Tan's attorney, N. Sreenivasan, declined to comment because the court case is ongoing.
Beyond traders at the three European banks, authorities are still probing the role of others.
For example, traders at JPMorgan Chase & Co also interacted with some of the traders under scrutiny who worked for Barclays and RBS, according to a person familiar with the situation and court documents filed in Singapore.
Similarly, Deutsche Bank AG also had several employees whose trading is under scrutiny by authorities, according to people familiar with the situation and court documents filed in Canada.
JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank declined to comment.
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Prophecy Platinum Announces Wellgreen Preliminary Economic Assessment:
38% Pre-Tax IRR, $3.0 Billion NPV, and a 37-Year Mine Life
Company Press Release
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada -- Prophecy Platinum Corp. (TSX-V: NKL, OTC-QX: PNIKF, Frankfurt: P94P) reports the results of an independent NI 43-101-compliant preliminary economic assessment for its fully owned Wellgreen nickel-copper-platinum group metals project in the Yukon Territory.
The independent assessment, prepared by Tetra Tech, evaluated a base case of an open-pit mine (with a mining rate of 111,500 tonnes per day), an on-site concentrator (with a milling rate of 32,000 tonnes per day), and an initial capital cost of $863 million. The project is expected to produce (in concentrate) 1.959 billion pounds of nickel, 2.058 billion pounds of copper, and 7.119 million ounces of platinum, palladium, and gold during a mine life of 37 years with an average strip ratio of 2.57.
The financial highlights of the preliminary economic assessment, shown in U.S. dollars, are as follows:
Payback period: 3.55 years
Initial capital investment: $863 million
IRR pre-tax (100% equity): 38 percent
NPV pre-tax (8% discount): $3 billion
Mine life: 37 years
Total mill feed: 405.3 million tonnes
Mill throughput: 32,000 tonnes per day
Prophecy Chairman John Lee says: "We are pleased with the preliminary economic assessment results. The numbers indicate that Wellgreen is one of most exciting mineral projects in the Yukon. The company is drilling to upgrade and expand the resource base. The infrastructure is excellent as the project is only 1,400 meters in altitude and 14 kilometers from the paved Alaska Highway, which leads to the Haines deep seaport. Discussions are under way with support from local stakeholders regarding permitting and logistics."
For the complete press release, please visit:
http://prophecyplat.com/news_2012_june18_prophecy_platinum_announces_res...
