A metals trader in Trafigura Group’s Mumbai office, who led the trading house’s relationship with the businessman at the heart of a massive alleged fraud, is leaving the company.
(Bloomberg) — A metals trader in Trafigura Group’s Mumbai office, who led the trading house’s relationship with the businessman at the heart of a massive alleged fraud, is leaving the company.
Trafigura trader Harshdeep Bhatia was the “main trader” working on the company’s dealings with Prateek Gupta, who Trafigura has accused of selling it nickel cargoes that didn’t contain any nickel, according to court filings.
Bhatia is leaving Trafigura, people familiar with the matter said separately, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public.
Trafigura has said it doesn’t believe any of its employees was complicit in what it described as a “systematic fraud” against it. A Trafigura spokesperson said the company would not comment on personnel matters. Bhatia did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Gupta said last week that Gupta planned a “robust response” to Trafigura’s allegations.
Trafigura court affidavits allege that Bhatia had a close relationship with Gupta that made some of his colleagues wary as they began to uncover the scale of the losses their company faced. Trafigura has said it stands to lose $577 million as a result of the alleged fraud.
Once Trafigura started investigating its dealings with Gupta, it tried to involve Bhatia “as little as possible in the investigation,” according to an affidavit from Mirza Ispahani, a Trafigura in-house lawyer. The trading house had no evidence that Bhatia was implicated in the alleged fraud, but nonetheless did not want to risk him “inadvertently (or deliberately) tipping off Mr Gupta.”
Bhatia had a “long-term relationship” with Gupta, Ispahani noted, and his Whatsapp messages with Gupta exhibited “an apparent ‘cosiness’ in that relationship.”
Trafigura asked Bhatia and other members of its team in Mumbai to export their Whatsapp messages with Gupta to its IT team, according to Ispahani’s affidavit. While that gave the company access to conversations including a group called the “UD Traf Nickel Team,” Trafigura believed there were gaps in the record. It decided against asking Bhatia and the other Mumbai employees for further access to their messages, judging that “any further approaches to plug “gaps” could arouse suspicion amongst the relevant individuals,” the filing says.
It may have been Bhatia who first introduced Gupta to Trafigura, according to a separate affidavit from former nickel head Socrates Economou. Bhatia’s communications with Gupta show “a degree of close familiarity,” Economou said, but were in his judgment “consistent with the fact that Mr Bhatia had known Mr Gupta for many years and, until recently, the parties had a cordial and functioning business relationship.”
Bhatia describes himself in his Linkedin profile as a senior trader with responsibility for trading nickel cathodes, briquettes and ferronickel in India and Southeast Asia, as well as refined metals more generally in India. He previously worked at Stemcor India and Essar Steel.
He is not the only person to leave Trafigura as the company sorts through the nickel losses. Bloomberg previously reported that Economou, the head of nickel trading, was leaving the company.
–With assistance from Jonathan Browning.
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