Nickel scam weighs heavy on London Metal Exchange

When traders at Stratton Metals sold 24 tonnes of nickel to a customer in Germany, they did not expect to find themselves caught up in one of the most embarrassing incidents to have hit the London Metal Exchange in recent years.

There can be problems with deliveries in the commodities industry. “At times you get ‘the pallets are broken’ or ‘the bags are broken’,” said Keith Dunleavy, the owner of Stratton, a London-based metals merchant. In this case, however, something more unexpected had happened. Rather than briquettes of nickel, half of the sacks had contained stones.

The customer emailed Dunleavy and Gordon Buchanan, a senior trader at Stratton, last week to alert them to the discovery. The metal had been held by the LME and

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