Former UBS Trader Arrested, Charged With Rigging Gold Prices
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sep 13, 2017
Three years after we first identified the former head of UBS’s gold desk in Zurich as someone directly implicated in the rigging of precious metals prices, Bloomberg reports that Andre Flotron, a Swiss resident, was arrested while visiting the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter.
Having been “on leave” since 2014, it appears Andre’s hope that he was gone but “keen to return in due time” are now up in smoke.
As Bloomberg reports, Flotron was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, commodities fraud and spoofing, according to a prepared complaint, and is the second person publicly charged in the U.S. investigation into the fixing of gold, silver, platinum and palladium prices.
As a a reminder, in June, David Liew, a former Deutsche Bank AG trader, pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court in Chicago for his role in the spoofing of contracts for gold, silver, platinum and palladium, according to court papers. Along with spoofing, he also acknowledged front-running customers’ orders.
Flotron’s arrest extends the Justice Department’s examination of whether bank traders conspired to rig interest-rate benchmarks and manipulate currency exchanges.
The probes, which led to guilty pleas and billions of dollars in payouts by some of the world’s biggest banks, also led prosecutors to begin investigating whether metals traders were placing orders without the intent of executing them in an attempt to move prices in their favor, a tactic known as spoofing.
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