As investors in OW Bunker A/S woke up to a string of horrors yesterday, the exchange on which the company was traded is still trying to assess the damage.
“Surprises like this are poison to the stock market, and this is one of the big surprises,” Carsten Borring, head of listings and capital markets at Nasdaq OMX in Copenhagen, said in a phone interview. “This really isn’t good.”
OW Bunker, which provides fuel to the marine industry, said on Wednesday shortly before midnight that it had lost $275 million through a combination of fraud committed by senior executives at its Singapore office and poor risk management. Its shares have been suspended since Nov. 5 and the company says its equity has been wiped out. Just eight months ago, investors drove OW Bunker’s shares up 21 percent in their first day of trading, following an initial public offering that valued it at almost $1 billion.
“There’s no doubt this case is damaging to investors and the stock market,” Borring said. “The stock market depends deeply on the relationship of trust between investors and companies.”
According to Niels Henrik Jensen, chairman of OW Bunker, the Singapore employee behind the alleged fraud “turned up at the company’s office and told his manager” what he’d done. Jensen declined to provide more details.
