How foreign exchange contracts blew up for Citic Pacific

Citic Pacific initially benefited from market-beating exchange rates before poorly judged foreign exchange contracts and a HK$14.7 billion loss landed the firm in a markets misconduct tribunal, a key inside witness said yesterday in a closely watched case that has wide implications for director responsibilities.

A former assistant director of finance at Citic Pacific, Simon Chui Wing-nin told the tribunal; “The original purpose of doing this all along was Citic Pacific going into TRF (target redemption forward) contracts wanting to lock in on an exchange rate that was lower than market rate.”

The most senior ex-Citic executive to give evidence so far, Chui explained how TRF allowed the firm to roll over contracts every month, benefiting from a favourable exchange rate between Australian and US dollars as the Hong Kong-listed firm launched an ambitious Australian mining venture.

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Those contracts later blew up when the Australian dollar moved sharply against the US dollar in 2008 triggering huge downside payouts from Citic to counterparties.

Now in its third week, the tribunal will decide whether red chip Citic Pacific, now known as Citic Ltd, and five former directors were “reckless” and “negligent” for signing off on a “false or misleading” exchange filing on September 12, 2008 that made no mention of the multibillion dollar losses the directors allegedly knew about.