Former Mitsui oil trader gets 5 years imprisonment for concealing loss

26-Feb-09

Noriyuki Yamazaki, ex-Mitsui oil trader has been sentenced to five years in Singapore jail for concealing losses worth US$81 mln after erroneous trading bets in 2006. Yamazaki pleaded guilty last week to falsifying documents, which were used by another department to prepare the estimated daily losses and gains. Japan's second-biggest trading house - Mitsui & Co was forced to shut Singapore based Mitsui Oil Asia (MOA) after it raked up the losses in naphtha trading up until Nov. 17, 2006. The losses were discovered after an internal investigation and the company said they had been "deceptively concealed". The judge said the losses amounted to 23 times the loss limit set for Yamazaki and 10 times the maximum loss limit for the company as a whole. Mitsui accounted for about half the trades of naptha trading in Singapore before it closured its operations there.