In Trafigura PTE Ltd. v. Gupta[[1]], a London High Court ruled in favor of Trafigura in its USD 500 million lawsuit against businessman Prateek Gupta over fake nickel cargoes. Now the commodities trader will turn its attention to recovery from the man who orchestrated a fraudulent scheme in which he and entities he controlled agreed to provide high-quality 99.8% pure nickel but instead delivered low-value and worthless materials.
While Gupta admitted he failed to deliver the high-quality nickel cargoes, he accused Trafigura head nickel trader Sokratis Oikonomou and other Trafigura staff of constructing the scheme.
In his judgment issued 30 January 2026, Judge Pushpinder Saini determined that Trafigura was induced to enter into contracts by fraudulent representations made by Gupta and his companies, finding Oikonomou and Trafigura staff “wholly innocent of any wrongdoing”.
“[The scheme was] a clear fraud on Trafigura, implemented by deceitful documentation, and in turn necessitating a substantial fraud on third parties, including banks, shipping lines and insurers”, said Judge Saini who added, “It cannot have been — and I find that no honest person can have believed that it was — of commercial benefit to or in the interests of Trafigura for it to be involved in such a scheme.”
According to the facts outlined in the case, Trafigura and Gupta began engaging in metal trading around 2014 or 2015. At this point, trading volumes between Trafigura and entities controlled by Gupta were “relatively small, consisting of one-off sale and purchase transactions.” In these dealings “no issues or complaints about Trafigura or end customers not receiving the contracted Nickel cargoes under these trades” occurred.
Around 2018, however, volumes between Trafigura and Gupta’s companies began to grow and the two sides “started to engage in a form of trading known as ‘transit financing’, or what the witnesses sometimes called ‘buy-back’ trades”, according to the case.
The scheme commenced thereafter and first surfaced in November 2022 when Trafigura began receiving complaints about cargoes it had sold. Trafigura then conducted full scale inspections which discovered cargoes did not contain nickel and led to a lawsuit brought against Gupta and his companies in February 2023 for fraud.
Trafigura contended that Gupta siphoned off funds from the alleged scheme to support his struggling businesses. Gupta countered that Trafigura devised a complex series of transactions that would appear to boost its position in nickel trading industry.
Judge Saini considered Gupta’s statements unreliable, in part due to a dearth of written documentation substantiating his claims. Judge Saini decisively rejected Gupta’s explanation, calling it a “knitting job” formed from pieces of communications and he concurred with Trafigura counsel’s assessment that Gupta had “no real defence to the fraud claim” and instead “decided to go ‘on the attack’ by inventing the story of the arrangement”.
In some trades, duplicate bills of lading were used to sell the same cargo more than once which Judge Saini found a variation of Gupta’s dishonest trading practice “plainly intended to injure Trafigura”. He added: “Mr Gupta offered no explanation at all … for how duplicate BLs came to be issued. I find that Mr Gupta did not provide an explanation because there is no innocent one.”
Judge Saini concluded that “the fraud was conceived of by Mr Gupta when he discovered (following the 2018 period of honest trading) that as long as Trafigura did not carry out inspections and accepted the truth of what was stated in the shipping documents, and [Gupta’s companies] bought back the cargoes, Trafigura would not discover that they had bought and financed worthless material and not Nickel. That period provided a useful ‘test run’ and established a relationship of trust between [Gupta’s companies] and Trafigura”.
According to the judgment, Trafigura is entitled to recover approximately USD 500 million from Gupta; the exact amount being dependent on resolution with other involved parties. The next phase of proceedings will entail efforts to track funds that Trafigura paid to Gupta’s companies that were not repaid.
[[1]]: Trafigura PTE Ltd. v. Gupta, [2026] EWHC 159 (Comm) (30 January 2026)
