Gupta later told Oikonomou that he had got around the restriction by having an unnamed partner process nickel imported from Russia into an alloy, the affidavit said. "The supposed objective behind this was to change the origin of the metal from Russian origin to an Indian (or at least non-Russian) retreated alloy," Oikonomou said in the affidavit. This was a time when "Russian origin material was becoming hard to sell in the market and difficult to obtain financing in respect from banks", he added.
Gupta blamed the unnamed partner for substituting nickel alloy for the high-grade nickel in the Trafigura cargoes, Oikonomou said.
The documents do not make clear the volumes of Russian nickel that was being smelted and rebranded as Indian metal. After Trafigura began to suspect in October last year that around 25,000 tonnes of metal sold by Gupta's firms may not be high-grade nickel, it scrambled to inspect over 1,000 shipping containers, court documents showed. Cargoes that Trafigura inspected contained other materials, including carbon steel, worth a fraction of the value of nickel, the documents said. While there have been scant restrictions imposed by Western governments on Russian metal, banks like Citi and some consumers have said they are no longer dealing with Russian metal. That does not seem to have impeded however the flow of metal from Russia.
The world's biggest refined nickel producer, Russia's
Nornickel, increased nickel production last year by 13.5% to
218,970 tonnes, while overall metal sales revenue dipped 6% to
$16.1 billion.
Indian imports of unwrought, non-alloyed nickel from Russia
fell 11% last year from 2021 levels to 2,617 tonnes, according
to Trade Data Monitor, worth about $65 million based on current
prices.
(Reporting by Polina Devitt and Eric Onstad; Additional
reporting by Pratima Desai and Sam Tobin; Editing by Jan Harvey)
