A US commodity trading house has filed a class-action lawsuit in New York against BP, Shell and Statoil, the three European oil companies being investigated by the European Commission for suspected manipulation of oil prices.
The oil companies "deliberately reported inaccurate, misleading and false information regarding Brent oil prices to Platts" as part of a "conspiracy to fix and restrain trade" in North Sea Brent oil, Chicago-based Prime International Trading Ltd. said in a Wednesday filing in New York.
The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that "hundreds of thousands" of NYMEX and ICE Brent crude futures contracts traded at artificial prices as a result of unlawful manipulation of reported oil prices since 2002.
The European Commission carried out unannounced inspections last week at a number of European oil companies as a result of suspicions that they colluded to manipulate reported oil and biofuel prices.
Shell, BP and Statoil said they were subject to EU antitrust inspections at their offices. Price reporting agency Platts and privately held Dutch oil company Argos Energies also were subject to inspections by EU antitrust officials.
Some of the world's biggest oil traders have also been contacted by the European Commission with requests for information related to its probe of the oil market, according to sources.
The European Commission has declined to give further details on the scope or initial motives for its investigations, but Statoil has said the probe of suspected collusion may involve price reporting dating back to 2002, the same year that Platts launched its Market on Close price discovery process in Europe.
The EU investigations are expected to yield information from the oil companies' internal records such as emails, phone records and trading data, according to Prime International's filing.
"The plaintiff believes further evidentiary support for the allegations will be unearthed after a reasonable opportunity for discovery," according to the filing.
Prime International said it was bringing the class-action on behalf of "unlawful injury" to itself and "at least thousands of dispersed class members transacted in Brent oil crude futures contracts."
Platts' North Sea Dated Brent benchmark is used to price more than half the world's crude and supports a range of derivative instruments accessible through futures exchanges and in over-the-counter markets.
