LONDON (Jan 31): Forged commodity-storage receipts discovered by a Glencore Plc unit have rekindled concerns over warehousing fraud two years, after the Qingdao scandal in China that cost banks hundreds of millions of dollars. In mid-2014 at Qingdao, metals held in warehouses were believed to have been pledged several times as collateral for loans, leading to hundreds of millions of dollars of bank writedowns. Private StorageThe LME has also developed a similar electronic register to track receipts for material held in private storage. The LMEshield system has been “designed to mitigate the risk of counterfeit receipts,” the LME said by e-mail Monday. While there are now 67 LMEshield approved warehouses, they cover just a fraction of the overall amount of refined metal held privately around the world.

Source: The Edge Markets January 31, 2017 12:43 UTC