The world's top metals trader is stuck in another nickel-shipment snafu after getting bags of stones from a Dutch warehouse
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- Trafigura discovered that it received bag of stones from a warehouse in Rotterdam instead of nickel.
- It is joined by others who made a similar discovery at the warehouse.
- Last month, Trafigura disclosed an unrelated fraud on nickel shipments and faces a $577 million loss.
The global metals trader Trafigura is among the companies that received bags of stone instead of nickel under London Metal Exchange contracts, Bloomberg reported.
The bags came from a warehouse in Rotterdam run by Access World and were shipped to New Orleans, where they were found to have the wrong weight, sources told Bloomberg.
Earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan Chase was the owner of bags of stones at the warehouse. Had they contained nickel, the bags would have been worth $1.3 million at current prices. Stratton Metals, a metal trader in Europe, also reportedly got bags of stones instead of nickel.
The LME first announced the mix-up last Friday but didn't disclose the owner of the bags or the warehouse where they were kept.
LME inspected all of its metal holdings at the warehouse and found that nine contracts contained material other than nickel.
Meanwhile, Trafigura has said there's no connection between the bags of stones and a separate snafu related to nickel cargoes.
Last month, the commodity giant acknowledged that some of its nickel cargoes had been substituted for carbon steel, a cheaper metal, leaving Trafigura potentially facing a $577 million loss. The final cost could be lower if it is able to recover some of the funds.
"Since late December 2022, a small proportion of the containers purchased from these companies have been inspected as they reached their destination, and were found not to contain nickel," Trafigura said in a statement last month, according to Bloomberg.
The incident led Trafigura to sue the Indian businessman Prateek Gupta in February, as well as TMT Metals and UIL Malaysia — companies associated with him.
A London court has since ordered a $625 million freeze on Gupta following Trafigura's legal action.