German probes into trading before last week's terrorist attacks are focusing on stock-index, oil and gold futures, airline and insurers' shares and options, Bundesbank President Ernst Welteke said.
German central bank research into trading before the attacks shows "that activities on international financial markets must have been planned and executed with the necessary knowledge," Welteke said, citing a Bundesbank memorandum.
"There were share price movements at a whole series of companies, especially at airlines," Welteke told reporters at a meeting of European finance officials. "Now it depends on the extent to which such suspicions can be verified -- on how far one can trace who has made such transactions." The US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating larger-than-normal trading of options in AMR Corp and UAL Corp.
Options traders said they noticed the unusually heavy volume before hijackers seized the airlines' jets on Sept 11.
Trading in some so-called put options, which rise in value when stock prices fall, surged as much as 285 times the previous average volume in AMR and UAL during the days before terrorists flew the hijacked United and American jets into the World Trade Center's twin towers and the Pentagon.
Welteke declined to identify the companies whose trading is being investigated by German authorities.
Trading in Munich Re, the world's biggest reinsurer, was about double the daily average volume over the past six months both on Sept. 6 and Sept. 7, Bloomberg data shows.
The Bundesbank examined short selling of equities, where investors sell borrowed shares hoping to profit from a decline in the price, Welteke said. Movements in puts, stock index futures and gold and oil prices "may need to be clarified," he said.
Oil prices, as measured by Brent crude oil futures contracts, gained almost 6 percent in the two weeks before the attacks. They rose as much as 13 percent to US$31.05 on Sept. 11, the day of the plane bombings.
"Before the attacks, we had a rise in oil prices which cannot be explained by fundamental data," Welteke said. "That may mean that people bought oil contracts which they later sold at a higher price."
Welteke said Germany's BAWe securities regulator and the Federal Crime Office are examining the "atypical trading" in cooperation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Juergen Stoltenow, a spokesman for Germany's Federal Crime Office, said investigators are in contact with the Bundesbank. He declined to provide details.
Rainer Kueppers, a spokesman for Munich Re, said the company hasn't yet been contacted by the BAWe. "If information is needed, we are ready to make it available," he said.
Asked whether other European regulators are studying the trading, Welteke said he assumes "they're all looking into it."
Bank of France Governor Jean-Claude Trichet said investigations in France by the stock-market regulator haven't yet produced conclusions. "There are suspicions," he said.
Belgium said it too is examining whether terrorists made money by trading shares before and after the attacks.
"There are investigations," Belgian central bank governor Guy Quaden said. Whether there are "suspicions -- I don't know." He declined to give details.
Deutsche Boerse AG, the company that runs Germany's main stock exchange, examined prices and volumes of selected stocks around Sept. 11, said spokesman Walter Allwicher. The study "has not shown any irregularities," he said.
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