JP Morgan Gold Traders Go To Jail, While JP Morgan Exits DoJ "Sin Bin"
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/jp-morgan-gold-traders-go-jail-while-jp-morgan-exits-doj-sin-bin
While three of JP Morgan’s top former gold traders were sentenced to jail in late August and September 2023, JP Morgan itself walks free after now having exited its 3 year-long Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DFA) with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) – an agreement which was signed in late September 2019, but began on September 29, 2020 and which expired in late September 2023.
This Deferred Prosecution Agreement relates to the September 2019 deal where JP Morgan paid US$ 920 million “in a criminal monetary penalty, criminal disgorgement, and victim compensation" to buy a ‘Get out of Jail Free card“, and avoided prosecution by the DoJ while admitting criminal wrongdoing.
With the expiry of this Agreement, JP Morgan now effectively gets out of the DoJ penalty ‘sin bin’, and will no longer have the DoJ looking over its shoulder, and will no longer have to submit annual compliance reviews to the DoJ.
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Specifically, according to the successfully prosecuted DoJ case, a group of JP Morgan precious metals traders, over an 8 year period, rigged the prices of not only gold and silver on COMEX, but of platinum and palladium on NYMEX as well:
“between approximately May 2008 and August 2016, Smith and Nowak, along with other traders on the JPMorgan precious metals desk, engaged in a widespread spoofing, market manipulation, and fraud scheme” involving “tens of thousands of deceptive trading sequences for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures contracts traded through the New York Mercantile Exchange Inc. (NYMEX) and Commodity Exchange Inc. (COMEX), which are commodities exchanges operated by CME Group Inc.”
The scheme involved the JP Morgan criminals injecting fake orders for precious metals futures contracts (that they intended to cancel before execution). These fake orders created “false and misleading information about the genuine supply and demand for precious metals futures contracts” which then drove “prices in a direction more favorable to orders they intended to execute on the opposite side of the market.”
Indeed, according to the New York Post, “prosecutors alleged the [JP Morgan] precious metals desk made as many as 50,000 spoof trades under Nowak’s watch” and that the global precious metals desk operated as an organized criminal enterprise.