As testimony closes in Trafigura fraud case, Gupta denies knowledge of duplicate cargoes

By Eric Onstad

LONDON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Indian businessman Prateek Gupta, accused by commodity group Trafigura of orchestrating a $600 million metals fraud, told a court on Friday he did not know who at his firms allegedly created fake documents to sell the same cargo to two customers.

Testimony wrapped up on Friday in the long-running trial, which will resume on December 10 for closing arguments.

Geneva-based Trafigura sued Gupta more than two years ago, saying he engineered a hoax in which he and his companies agreed to provide pure nickel but delivered steel or scrap instead.

On Thursday, Trafigura lawyers accused Gupta of siphoning off funds from the alleged fraud to prop up his business empire when his companies began to run out of funds in early 2021.

Gupta has said Trafigura employees devised the scheme at the centre of the case, an allegation the trader has repeatedly denied.

Trafigura lawyer Nathan Pillow showed Gupta copies of two shipping documents from 2022 with the same number, one of which he said was a duplicate one sold to Trafigura that had a stamp of TMT Metals AG, one of Gupta's companies.

"You... were driven by your financial difficulties to resort to this kind of scam," Pillow told Gupta in a London High Court.

"This created millions of dollars for your companies which were on the brink of collapse."

When Pillow asked Gupta who at TMT had stamped and signed the document, he replied on his third day of testifying that he did not know about any duplicate documents or who would have signed them.

In 2015, Gupta told Reuters he had big expansion plans for his UD Group, aiming to extend the group's reach into Europe, Russia and Africa and expand headcount from 250 people to 400 in the following two years.