送交者: Enlighten 于 2005-11-17, 09:59:47:
回答: 麻将算什么， 瞧人温拿玩真的。 由 Latino2 于 2005-11-17, 09:33:15:
Mystery after Chinese copper trader vanishes following heavy losses
BMS
724 words
15 November 2005
06:40
Agence France Presse
English
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2005 All reproduction and presentation rights reserved.
SHANGHAI, Nov 15 (AFP) -
Chinese authorities rejected Tuesday any link to a trader who was said to have worked for Beijing but vanished after running up wrong bets on copper futures contracts that could potentially cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Liu Qibing, who was executing trades on behalf of China's State Reserve Bureau (SRB), went missing recently after he built up massive short positions that traders claimed ranged anywhere between 100,000 and 600,000 tonnes.
Copper prices have soared this year, rising more than 30 percent, and on Monday they hit a record high of 4,132 dollars per tonne.
China, a huge consumer of copper, has in recent weeks tried to cool the price by drawing down some of its stocks.
In theory this should have made the price fall and Liu was apparently banking on this happening by taking out what are known as short positions -- selling copper he did not have in the hope of buying back his underlying commitments more cheaply in the future.
Officials with the general office of the SRB, which is in charge of the country's metals reserves, repeatedly denied Tuesday that Liu worked for them.
"We do not have such a person working for us," one official told AFP by telephone. Another official said he was "not clear" whether such a person existed.
China Futures Association chairman Chang Qing, who is also chairman of Jinpeng International Futures, told AFP that the man at the centre of the potential scandal remained a mystery.
"I've asked the State Reserve Bureau on the issue and they told me that they don't have any official with the name of Liu Qibing. The man in the center of the market rumor is not with the State Reserve Bureau," Chang said.
"They (State Reserve Bureau) have never heard of this person and I've never heard of this person."
However, traders in London and China said Liu did indeed exist and had headed the Beijing-based State Regulation Centre of Supplies Reserve (SRCSR), the state agency contracted to execute trades on behalf of the SRB.
"We have met him on several occasions," Robin Bhar, a London-based metals analyst at UBS, the Swiss investment bank, told AFP.
He added that according to Liu's business card, held in his hand, Liu was the department chief for the import and export department of the SRCSR.
Officials at the SRCSR said they were "unclear" about Liu.
A Zhejiang Nanhua Futures trader surnamed Zhou also said that Liu was "a trader and definitely an official of the bureau."
Zhou said that about four weeks ago stories had begun to surface that Liu had come under investigation by Chinese officials as his losses mounted.
To cool speculative pressure, China, the world's largest consumer of copper, last week said it would on Wednesday auction 20,000 tonnes of copper, while saying it had 1.3 million tonnes of copper stockpiled.
The announcement however only sparked speculation that China lacked the reserves necessary to honor the contracts falling due on December 21 and was attempting to minimise its trading losses, which could run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
Market specialists said the strategy was particularly unusual because China had always treated its commodities supplies as a state secret.
"To visibly advertise the sale ahead of time as well as to reveal the amount of its strategic reserve -- far in excess of most market expectations -- is a huge surprise," said Bhar.
"It smacks of desperation to do anything and everything to lower the price," said Bhar, adding that if China actually had the reserve they would be quietly flooding the market.
"It is doubtful whether the Reserve is able to deliver on those huge spot contracts," Zhou agreed.
Worries about the size of Liu's position has sparked fears that the copper market is about to be hit by a major scandal similar to when Yasuo Hamanaka, a Japanese trader lost 2.6 billion dollars for Sumitomo Corporation in 1996.
In late 2004, the mainland's Singapore-listed China Aviation Oil also went under when it was forced to seek court protection from creditors after revealing it had lost 550 million dollars through derivatives trades that turned sour.