Sumitomo to Settle 6 Copper Suits for $99 Million

Sumitomo Corp. said Wednesday that it will pay $99 million to U.S. copper traders, settling six class-action lawsuits in one of the biggest commodity trading scandals ever.

The suits were filed two years ago in federal court in New York after a series of unauthorized transactions by Sumitomo’s chief copper trader. The company was left with more than $2 billion in losses when the trades collapsed. Another suit is pending in California.

Sumitomo agreed in May to pay $158 million in fines to settle U.S. and British charges that it manipulated copper prices.

This is “another major step toward putting the copper incident behind us,” Sumitomo President Kenji Miyahara said in a statement.

The agreement will cause the Japanese trading company to post a one-time charge of about $78.6 million for the six months ending Sept. 30, though Sumitomo won’t have to revise its earnings forecast, the company said.

Sumitomo’s former chief copper trader Yasuo Hamanaka was sentenced to eight years in prison by Japanese courts in May after he admitted hiding $2.6 billion in trading losses from his bosses as part of an operation in which investors say he tried to buy enough copper to keep world prices rising.