Everything Is Rigged, Continued: European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe
POSTED: May 15, 12:05 PM ET
e’re going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.
According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data:
The commission said the alleged price collusion, which may have been going on since 2002, could have had a “huge impact” on the price of petrol at the pumps “potentially harming final consumers”.
Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the alleged rigging of oil prices was “as serious as rigging Libor” – which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.
The inquiry also involves Platts, the world’s largest oil price reporting agency. The concept here is very similar to both the LIBOR scandal, which involved banks manipulating the benchmark rates for interest rates, and to the possible rigging of interest rate swap prices through the manipulation of ISDAfix, the benchmark rate for those instruments, which is also the subject of a regulatory probe.
We wrote about both of those scandals in last month’s Rolling Stone article, “Everything is Rigged.” In that piece, finance professionals talked about the potential for manipulation in other markets that involve voluntary price reporting:
What other markets out there carry the same potential for manipulation? The answer to that question is far from reassuring, because the potential is almost everywhere. From gold to gas to swaps to interest rates, prices all over the world are dependent upon little private cabals of cigar-chomping insiders we’re forced to trust.
Related articles
- Oil Companies Raided in Price-Fixing Probe (news.firedoglake.com)
- BP and Shell raided for rigging prices for more than a decade (sott.net)
- Matt Taibbi ~ Everything Is Rigged, Continued: European Commission Raids Oil Companies In Price-Fixing Probe (shiftfrequency.com)
- Everything is rigged, continued: European Commission raids oil companies in price-fixing probe (sott.net)
- Top News: BP and Shell raided in oil price-rigging investigation (guardian.co.uk)
- FOCUS | Everything Is Rigged, Continued: Oil Companies Raided (readersupportednews.org)
- !!!!! Everything Is Rigged, Continued: Oil Companies Raided – by Matt Taibbi, May 17, 2013 (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
- Oil companies raided in EU probe (bbc.co.uk)
- Everything Is Rigged: European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe (counterinformation.wordpress.com)
- Everything Is Rigged, Continued: European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe (silveristhenew.com)
Replies
But of course. Currently, markets around the world crashing. Wonder if it will affect the U.S. market today http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message2241218/pg1