Traders who sued Louis Dreyfus Commodities BV for allegedly manipulating cotton prices last year are trying to avoid the blame for their own bad bets, the company said in a court filing Tuesday.
In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Louis Dreyfus said the plaintiffs, who include former senior Glencore trader Mark Allen, failed to provide any evidence that the company illegally inflated prices by monopolizing cotton futures. Instead, it said, the traders were speculators who sold cotton futures short at the wrong time.
"Despite their level of sophistication and full appreciation of the risk that they could lose money, plaintiffs now seek to shift the burden of their bad investment decisions onto Louis Dreyfus," the commodity trading giant said in the filing, which asked Judge Andrew Carter to throw out the case.
The move to dismiss the putative class action, one of the highest-profile commodity market manipulation cases in years,
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