GTR can reveal.
Court documents filed by GP Apac – a Singapore subsidiary of UAE-based oil giant GP Global Group – describe how the company ran into financial difficulties during 2020, prompted by pandemic-related disruption, a drop in demand for oil products, record low oil prices and
Its chief restructuring officer and sole director, Rod Sutton of FTI Consulting, says evidence then emerged of “irregular commodity trades and/or fictitious trades where there was no actual transfer of any underlying cargo”.
“This left the group with significant bad debt as the trade receivables due from these ‘trades’ are unlikely to be recoverable,” he says in an affidavit filed in Singapore’s High Court in February and seen by
Last January, a powerful commodities trader s gamble soured quickly.
(Bloomberg) In January, as a mysterious illness ripped through the Chinese city of Wuhan, global oil prices plunged. Two thousand miles away in the island state of Singapore, one of the most powerful men in the world of commodities trading, Lim Oon Kuin, quietly added to his vast stockpiles of fuel – making a bet that China would successfully control the spread of the new disease.
That gamble soured quickly. While China did curb the coronavirus at home, the pandemic that followed brought crude oil prices tumbling as much as 70%. Banks tried to recover loans from Lim’s company, Hin Leong Trading Pte, triggering one of the biggest scandals in the oil industry this century. Lim’s empire collapsed, owing $3.5 billion to 23 banks, and the fallout from the debacle is still reverberating into 2021, shaking out large tracts of the vast and often opaque $4 trillion global oil-trading industry.
Wrong-way bet on Covid is changing oil-trading industry forever theedgemarkets.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theedgemarkets.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Trade risk mitigation is now a high priority – digitisation will help achieve it
Published 3 months ago
Andrew Raymond, CEO, Bolero International
Brexit, Covid-19 and a series of significant fraud cases have intensified the quest for risk mitigation by banks and businesses engaged in international trade.
Even before the virus outbreak, well-known names in the banking world started to withdraw from financing oil and gas transactions because of the operational risk and losses they incurred.
The pandemic has caused huge disruption and alongside it have come the complications of Brexit and uncertainty about US-China trade relations. This is a potent mixture that adds to the risks of involvement in trade. The US Attorney General, US security agencies, Interpol and IBM[i] have in their different ways warned about the current confusion opening up opportunities for fraud as normal patterns of behaviour change.