John Basquill

European states’ pledges to accelerate defence spending will require significant support from trade finance lenders and insurers, particularly for hard-to-reach parts of supply chains, experts have said. Nato’s 32 members committed in June last year to increase public investment in defence to 5% of GDP within the next decade and, following this year’s summit, announced…

Santander has shut down its Navigator Global business less than a year after announcing plans for a major expansion, with chief executive John Carroll also leaving the bank, GTR can reveal. The bank built Navigator Global as a digital platform to help businesses develop cross-border operations by providing access to verified service providers, local experts…

Indonesian lender Bank Woori Saudara has failed in a bid to recoup US$39mn it lost to what it alleged was a coal trading fraud scheme based on forged or illicitly transferred letters of credit (LCs). The lender, which is owned by South Korea’s Woori Bank, filed a lawsuit in a Dubai court last year against…

After nearly two decades working in commodity finance for banks, 2023 proved to be a crossroads for Orhan Gunes. It was that year Gunes launched TradeQraft, a platform that originates financing facilities for commodity traders and distributes them to investors, using his small team’s industry expertise and technology to bridge funding gaps across the sector. …

Rasmala Trade Finance Fund has failed in its latest attempt to recover millions of dollars from Trafigura, which it said was unjustly enriched by a fraud scheme carried out by an Indian coal trader. The fund, which was managed by Rasmala Investment Bank before entering voluntary liquidation last year, filed a US$22mn lawsuit against Trafigura…

American Express processed around US$13bn in transactions believed to relate to trade-based money laundering (TBML), US federal authorities have revealed, following a major enforcement action against the company. The US Federal Reserve Board and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which sits within the US Treasury and enforces money laundering legislation in the…

Law firm Sullivan has brought in Veronika Koroleva, the former head of Hill Dickinson’s trade finance practice, further bolstering its trade and export finance practice. London-based Koroleva has been hired as counsel at the firm after nearly a year at Hill Dickinson and more than six years at gunnercooke. She started her career at…

British International Investment (BII), the UK’s development finance institution, has named Freddie Tucker as head of trade finance, overseeing teams in London, Lagos and Johannesburg. Nairobi-based Tucker joined BII in 2019, initially based in the London office, before being appointed financial services lead for East Africa in 2022. His new role has been effective since…

Post-maturity finance, an emerging variation of supply chain finance, could be treated as debt if a company’s use of such programmes is deemed “significant”, ratings agency Moody’s has said. Emerging from German-speaking markets in the last few years, post-maturity finance allows buyers to manage their working capital by extending payment terms. But unlike payables finance…

Trafigura has renewed a US$150mn revolving credit facility backed by Etihad Credit Insurance to support its purchase of UAE-origin commodities, with HSBC joining Natixis and First Abu Dhabi Bank as lenders. The trading giant initially signed the two-year facility in September 2024, with support from the UAE’s federal export credit agency as well as the…