A former trader at UBS Group AG was charged with conspiracy and fraud over his suspected role in manipulating the price of precious metals.

Andre Flotron, who worked at the bank in Switzerland and Stamford, Connecticut, is the second person publicly charged in the U.S. investigation into the fixing of gold, silver, platinum and palladium prices. Flotron, a Swiss citizen, was arrested while visiting his girlfriend in New Jersey. He was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, commodities fraud and spoofing. He faces as many as 25 years in prison on the most serious charge.

However, it was the precious metals 'markets' that went a little turbo. At 1906ET, Silver futures flash-smashed higher, running the day's high-stops, before plunging back to earth...

This would normally be shrugged off as just another example of the utter farce that global capital markets have become. However, a glance back in recent history at the silver market's most recent chaos moment - on July 6th - and a 'funny' thing stood out!!!

“All fundamental factors aside, it does tremendous technical damage to the market,”

“There should be some effort to study this and come to some solution that will make for a more orderly trading pattern. This type of activity is not good for a fair playing field.”

The precious metal struggled to bounce back from its low on June 26 because the transaction pushed the price below the 200-day moving average, triggering automated sell orders set by algorithmic traders, thereby sustaining the slump.

Many analysts are calling the flash crash a ‘trading error’ or fat finger.’ However, this is somewhat lazy and ignores a few pertinent facts and context.

The aggressive selling had all the hallmarks of market manipulation as $450 million worth of silver futures were sold in a minute. An entity appears to have wanted silver lower and the massive sell order achieved that goal.

Silver dropped from 16.05 down to 14.82 before rebounding to 15.89

Gold dropped 5 - platinum down 11

David Liew, formerly a junior precious metals trader with Deutsche Bank in Singapore, has been permanently banned from trading in CFTC-regulated markets. In court in Chicago last week, Liew pled guilty to charges of fraud for his role in spoofing and manipulating precious metals futures markets - gold, silver, platinum and palladium - between December 2009 and February 2012. His crimes included front-running client orders and trying to trip stop loss orders left with the bank.

A trader who conspired to manipulate futures contracts in precious metals committed those actions while working at Deutsche Bank AG, according to a person familiar with the matter, and he is now cooperating with prosecutors.

The trader, David Liew, pleaded guilty to fraud on Thursday in federal court in Chicago for his role in the spoofing of contracts for gold, silver, platinum and palladium, according to court papers. Along with spoofing which is placing orders without the intent of executing them in an attempt to manipulate the price he also acknowledged front-running customers’ orders.

Liew’s cooperation suggests more headaches for Deutsche Bank and its traders. Liew worked on his own but also with at least three other traders at the bank to coordinate spoofing hundreds of times, practices he said he learned from his co-workers, according to court documents. Liew’s employer is described as Bank A in the plea agreement and identified as Deutsche Bank by the person familiar with the matter.

Barclays and three other banks told a New York federal court Monday that they didn't waste its time when requesting a second shot at tossing a case over their alleged conspiracy to manipulate the price of gold, saying investors' use of flawed data in the suit justifies a do-over.

Barclays Bank PLC, HSBC Bank PLC, Societe Generale, and the Bank of Nova Scotia again asked the court for permission to renew their dismissal bid, fighting against investors who say their suit still supports allegations of collusive trading even after admitting the complaint included flawed data analyses.

On the afternoon of April 11, London’s daily gold price benchmark fix took a peculiar turn: It was about $12 under the spot price. The auction appeared to be stuck on a descending escalator from an initial $1,265.75, before fixing at $1,252.90.

Based on documents in the public domain to which we refer below, we consider that there are good grounds to believe that members of six well-known financial services groups combined together to manipulate the outcome of the London Gold Fixing between about 2004 and 2014 and that members of four of those groups combined to manipulate the outcome of the London Silver Fixing between about 1999 and 2014. The effect of this was to create false market prices, in particular by artificially depressing prices after the 3pm (London time) Gold Price Fixing and to increase bid-offer spreads in physical gold, physical silver and their respective derivative instruments. The relevant institutions did this to increase their profits from their own activities in these markets at the expense of other market participants who have therefore suffered loss and damage, probably running into hundreds of millions of pounds in aggregate.

If it can be established that these financial institutions participated in price fixing then we consider that there can be little doubt that they have breached section 2 of the Competition Act 1998 and are liable to pay damages to any other market participant that suffered loss and damage as a result.