FirstFT: Credit score Suisse used suspicious invoices for Greensill mortgage

Credit score Suisse offered an emergency $140mn mortgage to Greensill Capital based mostly partly on invoices to corporations who deny ever doing the enterprise acknowledged on the paperwork.

The Swiss financial institution offered the mortgage in October 2020, lower than 5 months earlier than the collapse of Greensill, a provide chain finance agency that counted former UK prime minister David Cameron as a senior adviser.

Invoices issued by metals magnate Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Commodities and offered to Greensill fashioned a part of the collateral for the mortgage, based on paperwork seen by the Monetary Instances and other people aware of the transaction. But a number of of the events named on the invoices have advised the FT they did no enterprise with Liberty.

The obvious failure to identify that suspicious invoices have been pledged as collateral casts recent gentle on danger administration failures at Credit score Suisse.

It additionally raises new questions over the practices at Greensill and Liberty. The commodities firm is a part of Gupta’s GFG Alliance, which is being probed by the UK’s Severe Fraud Workplace and French police over suspected fraud and cash laundering. GFG has constantly denied any wrongdoing.

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