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Inside the JPMorgan trading desk the U.S. called a crime ring
By Tom Schoenberg
Bloomberg News
Monday, September 28, 2020
Billionaires have Davos. For filmmakers, there's Sundance. For the people who mine and trade and ship everything from iron ore to platinum, there's London Metal Exchange Week. It's a blur of symposiums and drinks, with a reliably lavish lunch thrown by JPMorgan Chase & Co. On a balmy October day in 2018, hundreds of guests crossed a courtyard in the shadow of the Bank of England to a medieval guild hall for champagne and sashimi courtesy of the bank and its top metals trader, Mike Nowak.
Nowak had plenty to celebrate. His global trading desk at JPMorgan was the powerhouse in futures contracts for gold, silver, platinum and palladium that account for tens of trillions of dollars in transactions annually. In his mid-40s, Nowak had run the precious metals desk for more than a decade. He had a young family, a house outside Manhattan and a seven-bedroom vacation home a few blocks from the beach in New Jersey.
But that world was unraveling. Unbeknown to Nowak, one of his former employees was turning on him.
... Dispatch continues below ...
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That same day, the sun was barely up in Brooklyn when a trader named John Edmonds set off for a meeting with federal prosecutors. Edmonds, who'd worked for years on Nowak's desk, took a four-hour car trip to Hartford, Connecticut, where he told authorities that Nowak's crew wasn't just buying and selling precious metals, but systematically cheating to help themselves and their top clients. Edmonds admitted to fraudulent trades that day in a sealed guilty plea. Soon, others from the precious metals desk provided accounts, setting off events leading to criminal charges against Nowak and four others from the bank.
Testimony by Edmonds and others also underpins a U.S. Justice Department criminal investigation into the bank itself that people familiar with the matter say will be resolved in coming days. They said the bank is expected to pay around $1 billion to settle with the Justice Department and U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Among the alleged misdeeds is so-called spoofing, or planting fake orders into the market to steer others into buying or selling at prices that favor the bank. In authorities' years-long crackdown on spoofing -- which has included the conviction of two former Deutsche Bank metals traders in Chicago late last week -- the expected JPMorgan penalty would be several times the size of previous settlements. ...
... For the remainder of the report:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-28/inside-the-jpm-precio...
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