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February
20
2017

Proposed Global Class Action Gold & Silver Manipulation Lawsuit
Dave Kranzler

This news was originally disseminated by GATA on February 5th.  A British law firm, Leon Kaye Soliciters, has proposed the initiation of a class-action lawsuit charging that six “well known” financial services groups conspired to manipulate the London Gold Fixing from 2004 – 2014.   The proposal cites the recent settled Deutsche Bank class action suit for in New York and the ongoing billion dollar class action suit in Ontario, Canada.  The class action suit would be open to investors globally.  If interested contact Leon Kaye at [email protected].  Here’s a summary of the proposal:

Based on documents in the public domain to which we refer below, we consider that there are good grounds to believe that members of six well-known financial services groups combined together to manipulate the outcome of the London Gold Fixing between about 2004 and 2014 and that members of four of those groups combined to manipulate the outcome of the London Silver Fixing between about 1999 and 2014. The effect of this was to create false market prices, in particular by artificially depressing prices after the 3pm (London time) Gold Price Fixing and to increase bid-offer spreads in physical gold, physical silver and their respective derivative instruments. The relevant institutions did this to increase their profits from their own activities in these markets at the expense of other market participants who have therefore suffered loss and damage, probably running into hundreds of millions of pounds in aggregate.

If it can be established that these financial institutions participated in price fixing then we consider that there can be little doubt that they have breached section 2 of the Competition Act 1998 and are liable to pay damages to any other market participant that suffered loss and damage as a result.

Market participants who have suffered loss and damage are entitled to claim damages in proceedings in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (“CAT”) in a class action pursued either on an ‘opt-out’ or an ‘opt-in’ basis.

You can read the entire announcement here:  Proposed Precious Metals Class Action Suit

While I’m skeptical that this will have an impact on the market, even if the suit is ultimately filed, there’s always the chance that court-ordered discovery – assuming these banks have not destroyed and wiped clean any evidence – could reveal the truth.   And the truth will set the gold/silver price free.

Dave Kranzler spent many years working in various analytic jobs and trading on Wall Street. For nine of those years, he traded junk bonds for Bankers Trust. He earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago, with a concentration in accounting and finance. Currently he co-manages Golden Returns Capital, a precious metals and mining stock investment fund based in Denver. He writes a blog and offers in-depth, unique research reports to help people understand and analyze what is really going on in our financial system and economy:

investmentresearchdynamics.com