The man blamed by Metallgesellschaft AG for massive oil-trading losses that nearly toppled the German industrial giant is suing his former employer and its main shareholder, Deutsche Bank, seeking $1 billion in damages for alleged defamation and civil conspiracy.
Metallgesellschaft, the big metals and engineering conglomerate that is Germany's 14th largest corporation, stunned its shareholders last December by announcing losses of about $1 billion in its trading at the New York Mercantile Exchange and off-exchange markets in energy derivatives.
W. Arthur Benson, former president of Metallgesellschaft unit MG Refining &Marketing Inc. and head of the company's U.S. oil-trading operation, alleges in his complaint that these catastrophic losses need not have occurred.
Mr. Benson asserts in the lawsuit, which was filed in Baltimore's U.S. District Court, that his efforts to staunch the losses were sabotaged by "byzantine maneuverings" designed to discredit former Metallgesellschaft Chairman Heinz Schimmelbusch, who was fired in December. Mr. Benson was dismissed in February.
Spokesmen for Metallgesellschaft and Deutsche Bank couldn't be reached for comment. On Friday, an MG spokesman in New York told the Dow Jones International Petroleum Report that the lawsuit is "totally without merit" but declined to address details contained in it.
Mr. Benson's lawsuit proffers an elaborate, 20-page defense of his widely criticized oil trading and hedging methods. It lifts the veil of secrecy that has cloaked MG's oil marketing and trading business and spells out many of the details of the company's techniques.
The complaint says MG executives approached Mr. Benson in October 1991 about heading the firm's business marketing oil and gasoline products to service stations and other buyers throughout the U.S. Part of the job, the suit says, was to hedge these supply commitments using oil-futures contracts and other so-called derivatives, which are instruments whose values are derived from the prices of other assets -- in this case, oil and gasoline.
The next month, Mr. Benson says, he left Louis Dreyfus Energy Corp., where he performed similar duties, for MG, bringing about 50 members of his Dreyfus staff with him. For the next two years, Mr. Benson and his staff negotiated an array of agreements to supply customers with petroleum products for up to 10 years into the future. The group hedged these commitments, he says, with derivatives.
By September 1993, Mr. Benson says, MG controlled total derivatives positions representing about 150 million barrels of oil, worth a total of about $2.8 billion at then-current prices. And in November, after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries failed to reach an agreement limiting exports, oil prices plunged sharply, devastating MG's derivatives positions.
Among other things, Mr. Benson's complaint asserts that the losses on the derivative positions would have been offset, in time, by profits from MG's oil-marketing agreements with its customers. The suit also claims that Mr. Benson devised a strategy to use options contracts to stem the hundreds of millions of dollars in margin calls the company was paying to maintain its derivatives positions.
The complaint asserts, moreover, that Metallgesellschaft's new managers, including Deutsche Bank executive Ronaldo Schmitz, opted instead to liquidate MG's derivatives positions, so that "paper losses became real and palpable."
People familiar with MG's trading activities expressed skepticism yesterday about some of Mr. Benson's claims. For example, Mr. Benson says in his complaint that buying oil "put" options contracts in early December would have allowed the company to keep its derivatives hedges intact "without the cash drain otherwise required by massive margin calls." Buying put options confers the right to sell oil for prearranged prices at some point in the future.
A person familiar with the company's trading says that while buying put options might have helped to prevent additional losses, it wouldn't have reversed losses that had already occurred.
"That would be equivalent to freezing a loss at a certain point," the person said. "If you have losing futures positions and profitable options positions, you don't get to take out that money. What some people do is use the options profit as collateral to borrow money against, but by that first week of December, they had already used up their line of credit, so I don't know who was going to loan them money on the basis of those profitable positions."
Finally, Mr. Benson alleges that Metallgesellschaft's new managers defamed him in an array of published comments blaming his oil-trading operation for the German company's near-collapse. He requests a jury trial and seeks $250 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages for the alleged defamation and the same amounts for his allegations of civil conspiracy.
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