US Judge reschedules trial of FX Cartel for October 2018
Judge Richard Berman of the New York Southern District Court agreed with the ex-traders to move the start of the trial from June 4, 2018 to October 1, 2018.
Judge Richard Berman of the New York Southern District Court has agreed with a request by former Forex traders Richard Usher, Rohan Ramchandani, and Christopher Ashton, also known as the FX Cartel or FX Mafia, to move the start of their trial from June 4, 2018 to October 1, 2018.
Earlier today, the Judge signed a Memo Endorsement agreeing with a motion filed by the defendants last week.
As FinanceFeeds reported, the request for delay reflects what the defendants called “the staggering amount of recently-produced discovery”.
The defendants estimate that at the time of the last status conference on November 9, 2017, the US government had produced nearly 800,000 records totaling 8.2 million pages. In the last two months, the government has produced an estimated 2.2 million additional records totaling 21.4 million pages. The government has turned over millions of electronic chats, emails, and other documents spanning nearly 30 million pages, as well as raw data representing literally hundreds of millions of FX trades. The government has also produced an estimated 270,000 audio files totaling 4,388 hours of recorded audio. These audio files are not accompanied by transcriptions.
The defendants have also stressed that the government has not produced any of the statements made by its “star witness” to foreign authorities and has said that it is still awaiting further information from its cooperating witnesses. Although the defendants hope to resolve this issue directly with the government, this process has already taken almost three months.
In November 2017, the defendants asked the Court to compel the US Government to help them access statements by the chief witness to the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Australia Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), and Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC).
Back then, the defendants noted the importance of this evidence to the defense: The Cooperating Witness has provided statements to the three regulators and those regulators subsequently found no antitrust violations in the same conduct at issue in the case — with the SFO explaining that “a detailed review of the available evidence led us to the conclusion that the alleged conduct, even if proven and taken at its highest, would not meet the evidential test required to mount a prosecution.”
According to the defendants, these facts suggest that the Cooperating Witness’s testimony contains exculpatory and impeaching statements.
Usher, former Head of G11 FX Trading-UK at an affiliate of Royal Bank of Scotland plc, as well as former Managing Director at an affiliate of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Ramchandani, former Managing Director and head of G10 FX spot trading at an affiliate of Citicorp, and Ashton, former Head of Spot FX at an affiliate of Barclays PLC, are alleged to have conspired to manipulate the FX market by “coordinating their bidding, offering, and trading” at “certain times.”
The case is captioned USA v. Usher et al (1:17-cr-00019).