Barely a day had passed since the historic admission of gold and silver price rigging by Deutsche bank, which as we reported on Thursday was settled with not only "valuable monetary consideration", but Deutsche's "cooperation in pursuing claims" against other members of the cartel, i.e., exposing the manipulation of other cartel members, and the class action lawsuits have begun.
Overnight, two class action lawsuits seeking $1 billion in damages on behalf of Canadian gold and silver investors were launched in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
The first class action alleges that the defendants, including The Bank of Nova Scotia, conspired to manipulate prices in the silver market under the guise of the benchmark fixing process, known as the London Silver Fixing, for a fifteen-year period.
More from the suit:
It is further alleged that the defendants manipulated the bid-ask spreads of silver market instruments throughout the trading day in order to enhance their profits at the expense of the class. This alleged conduct affected not only those investors who bought and sold physical silver, but those who bought and sold silver-related financial instruments.
Law enforcement and regulatory authorities in the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom have active investigations into the defendants' conduct in the precious metals market.
The case is on behalf of all persons in Canada who, between January 1, 1999 and August 14, 2014, transacted in a silver market instrument either directly or indirectly, including investors who participated in an investment or equity fund, mutual fund, hedge fund, pension fund or any other investment vehicle that transacted in a silver market instrument.
A copy of the Notice of Action can be found at sotosllp.com. Potential class members can register on the website to obtain more information as the case progresses.
The plaintiffs and the proposed national class are being represented by a national team of lawyers from Sotos LLP (www.sotosllp.com), Koskie Minsky LLP (www.kmlaw.ca) and Camp Fiorante Matthews Mogerman (www.cfmlawyers.ca) with offices in Ontario and British Columbia.
An identical class action lawsuit was also launched for gold manipulation.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: with DB's official "admission", countless other plaintiffs will step up, and everyone who may have "lost" money trading gold over the noted 15 year period will surely demand to be made whole.
More importantly, we are curious to see what if anything the discovery process will unveil. This is what we said on Thursday:
Since this is just one of many lawsuits filed over the past two years in Manhattan federal court in which investors accused banks of conspiring to rig rates or prices in financial and commodities markets, we expect that now that DB has "turned" that much more curious information about precious metals rigging will emerge, and will confirm what the "bugs" had said all along: that the precious metals market has been rigged all along.
Now that Canada has broken the seal, we expect similar lawsuits to follow in the U.S.
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As a reminder, this is what the gold and silver settlement terms sheets looked like.