Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- Credit Suisse Group AG executives ignored warnings from colleagues about troubled steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta as they channeled $1.2 billion of client funds to his businesses, according to people familiar with the matter.Bankers in Credit Suisse’s commodity trade-finance unit blacklisted Gupta’s Liberty Commodities Ltd. in 2016 because they suspected some of its deals weren’t legitimate, the people said. When they learned about two years later that the bank was lending to his companies through a suite of investment funds, which eventually grew to $10 billion, they flagged their worries to leaders in compliance and the division that housed the loans, one of the people said.The disclosure that Credit Suisse may have put clients at risk despite internal concerns over Gupta’s businesses adds a new twist to the debacle stemming from the March implosion of Greensill Capital, the finance firm at the center of the three-way relationship.Investigations, LawsuitsThe U.K. Serious Fraud Office is now investigating Gupta’s group of companies for suspected fraud, including in its financing deals with Greensill, according to a May 14 statement. Credit Suisse has sued to force Gupta’s Liberty Commodities into insolvency and has since shut the funds that made the loans and launched an internal investigation. Investors are staring at losses as the bank confronts embarrassing lawsuits.“We are currently focusing our efforts on recovering our investors’ money,” Will Bowen, a spokesman for Credit Suisse in London, said in an emailed statement, adding that the bank’s internal probe will focus on “all of the issues” linked to the funds. “We are committed to learning the lessons and will share the relevant lessons learnt at the appropriate time.”Andrew Mitchell, a spokesman for the Gupta Family Group Alliance, or GFG Alliance, a collective of businesses linked to Gupta including Liberty Commodities, denied any wrongdoing.The Greensill saga represents just one of the two disasters that rocked Credit Suisse in the first half of 2021. Since Greensill began unraveling, the bank has announced a $5.5 billion hit from the blowup at Archegos Capital Management.ApologiesFormer Chairman Urs Rohner apologized to shareholders and his successor, Antonio Horta-Osorio, who arrived at the end of April, has promised a sweeping strategy review.Chief Executive Officer Thomas Gottstein, who was head of the division that oversaw trade finance, wasn’t aware of the internal concerns about Gupta that had prompted the bank to cut him off, according to a person familiar with the matter.Employees at the trade-finance unit, which lends money for the buying and selling of commodities, cut ties with Gupta in 2016 after becoming skeptical toward his Liberty Commodities, the people said. They distrusted the documents the company provided, triggering doubts about its transactions, they said. In one example reported by Bloomberg, the company had presented another bank with what seemed to be duplicate shipping receipts. A spokesman for Gupta has denied any wrongdoing.Banking TiesLiberty Commodities pledged assets to Credit Suisse as security for borrowings in 2013 but by early 2016, all such commitments had been extinguished, indicating that the financing relationship had ceased, U.K. Companies House filings show. And while Gupta’s company listed the Swiss bank as one of its lenders in its 2014 annual report, it didn’t in the following year’s report, which is dated May 2016, according to the filings.Their counterparts at other banks, including Macquarie Group Ltd. and Sberbank PJSC, halted trading with Liberty Commodities around the same time because of similar concerns; Goldman Sachs Group Inc. also stopped in 2016, Bloomberg has reported.Nevertheless, executives at Credit Suisse’s asset-management division -- which creates investment products for clients and charges a fee for overseeing them -- began arranging a suite of funds focused on supply-chain finance in 2017. The entities bought securitized loans packaged by Greensill, a firm created by Australian businessman Lex Greensill. Much of the debts were linked to Gupta’s businesses.WarningsOfficials at the commodity trade-finance unit were concerned when they found out about the funds’ links to Gupta and took their fears to Thomas Grotzer, general counsel for the bank’s Swiss division. They also warned Luc Mathys and Lukas Haas, the bankers who helped oversee the trades at the asset-management unit.Grotzer was promoted last month to interim global head of compliance at Credit Suisse. He didn’t respond to requests for comment. Mathys, head of fixed-income at the asset-management division, and Haas, a portfolio manager, were put on temporary leave in March. Neither responded to requests for comment.The bank pushed ahead with the funds and marketed them to investors as being made up of short-term debt secured on invoices, assets considered so safe that Credit Suisse gave the largest vehicle its lowest rating for risk. Yet part of the loans were linked to mere possible future revenues.Other parts of the bank continued working with Gupta as well. Credit Suisse’s investment bankers were due to lead an initial public offering for Liberty’s U.S. steel arm, which was ultimately pulled, according to a statement from the company. Gupta also announced that the Swiss bank would finance his planned acquisition of Thyssenkrupp AG’s steel unit, which fell apart earlier this year.Credit Suisse has so far recouped about $5.9 billion of the $10 billion in these supply-chain funds, but it remains unclear how much will be returned ultimately to investors. Loans to Gupta’s businesses are among a batch of debts that are the “principal sources of valuation uncertainty,” the bank said earlier this month.Liberty Commodities’s external legal advisors investigated “alleged rumors concerning the paperwork” it used in 2019, according to Mitchell, the spokesman for GFG Alliance. They found no evidence to substantiate the rumors, nor was the company “ever subject to further complaints or proceedings,” he said.“LCL has ongoing banking relationships with separate financial institutions,” Mitchell said, referring to Liberty Commodities. “The trade-finance market has been hugely challenging for all but the very largest commodities traders in recent years. Nevertheless, no financial institution has been left out of pocket as a result of lending money to LCL. On the contrary, they have received substantial commercial returns.”More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.<doc-sep>Recent leaks have strongly suggested that we would see new Ryzen desktop processors and APUs meant for laptop at CES 2019, but we might also get a bonus bonanza of new Radeon graphics as well. Wccftech claims to have received a confirmation of the introduction of a new Radeon graphics card, which might just be the introduction of 7nm Vega II GPUs. AMD has previously stated that it will next introduce a 7nm graphics architecture and the company has done just that with its Radeon Instinct GPU in the enterprise market. Read more: AMD Radeon VII More recently we saw that AMD trademarked a new Vega II logo – though AMD could easily pull a fast one and introduce yet another generation of Polaris graphics cards. Either way, we’re excited to see any new graphics cards from AMD after a relatively quiet year of GPU releases in 2018. Ryzen again What does seem a little more certain is AMD’s plans to introduce new CPUs and APUs at CES 2019. 7nm desktops seem like a certainty given that AMD is on track to introduce 7nm processors following 12nm Ryzen 2nd Generation chips. It also helps a recent leak blew open the whole Ryzen 3rd Generation will start with quad-core entry-level processors leading up to some of the first mainstream 16-core CPUs. An upcoming Picasso series of APUs that put together AMD’s 12nm processors with a new generation of discrete-class Vega graphics also seems all but certain as well. These new chips are said to power a new generation of laptops including the next-generation Surface laptop as well as a streaming-only iteration of the next Xbox. Whether these rumors are true or not, we definitely know AMD will have an action packed CES 2019, you can bet we’ll be there to report on everything you need to know.<doc-sep>AMD has been lagging behind Nvidia for years in the high-end gaming graphics card race, to the point that it’s primarily been pushing bang-for-the-buck cards like the RX 580 instead. But at CES, the company says it has a GPU that’s competitive with Nvidia’s RTX 2080. It’s called the Radeon VII (“Seven”), and it uses the company’s first 7nm graphics chip that we’d seen teased previously. It’ll ship on February 7th for $699, according to the company. That’s the same price as a standard Nvidia RTX 2080. Here’s the large, shiny graphics card that AMD CEO Lisa Su held up onstage: AMD says the second-gen Vega architecture offers 25 percent more performance at the same power as previous Vega graphics, and the company showed it running Devil May Cry 5 here at 4K resolution, ultra settings, and frame rates “way above 60 fps.” AMD says it has a terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth. Grid View Image: AMD Image: AMD Image: AMD Image: AMD Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge As for existing games, AMD didn’t break out loads of examples, but it says you’ll see a 25 percent performance boost in Fortnite and a 35 percent boost in Battlefield V, as well as assorted 27 percent-plus boosts in various kinds of content creation, compared to the Radeon RX Vega 64. The company says it’ll throw in free copies of the Resident Evil 2 remake Devil May Cry 5 and The Division 2 with each new AMD Radeon VII graphics card or gaming PC that comes with one installed. AMD says the Alienware Area-51 Threadripper gaming desktop will be one of the first. If you’re curious about other tech specs, here are the ones we have so far from AMD’s press release: 60 compute units 3840 stream processors running at up to 1.8GHz 16GB of HBM2 memory 1 TB/s memory bandwidth 4,096-bit memory interface The real question is whether AMD will be able to ship enough of this GPU at a competitive enough price — since GPU prices go up and down at retail, according to supply and demand — so that gamers can actually buy one. The first-gen Radeon RX Vega GPUs were technically competitive with Nvidia on speed, but they were harder to actually find and buy.<doc-sep>
At CES, AMD revealed the Radeon Vega VII, the world’s first 7nm graphics card for consumers, but there could be bigger plans ahead for the rest of the new year. In a new interview, Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer, hints that 2019 could be the year when AMD has a full lineup of 7nm Radeon GPUs. Though AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI60 enterprise GPU was the first 7nm GPU to be released in late 2018, with the Vega VII the second GPU for consumers, both are just the start of the roadmap. According to Mark Papermaster, additional, and perhaps cheaper, AMD GPUs built on the 7nm architecture are coming to consumers. “What we do over the course of the year is what we do every year. We’ll round out the whole roadmap. We’re really excited to start on the high-end … you’ll see the announcements over the course of the year as we round out our Radeon roadmap,” said Papermaster to The Street. As announced at CES, the AMD Radeon Vega VII is priced at $700. If what Papermaster says holds true, a less expensive 7nm GPU and desktop processors could further bolster AMD’s position in the chipset market. Still, AMD remains the only chipset maker building on the more efficient and performance-packed 7nm process. AMD rivals Intel and Nvidia are selling products based on an older and less advanced production process. As proof of the power of 7nm GPUs, the Radeon Vega VII packs a total of 60 compute units and a clock rate of 1.8 GHz and is built on the second-generation AMD Vega architecture. It also sports 16GB of HBM2 memory at a bandwidth of 1TB a second. AMD also promised that the power in Vega VII can lead to a 35-percent increase in performance in Battlefield 5 over last generation’s Radeon RX Vega 64. It also can perform just as well as the Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 in some games. There’s still no support for ray tracing on the new 7nm GPU, however, which has been a source of controversy in the past. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su previously said it is in “deep development” to support ray tracing, a headline feature on Nvidia’s graphics cards. For now, benchmarks will have to be produced to tell us the truth about the true power of AMD’s first 7nm consumer GPU, but if it can build more chips on the technology and expand to a full lineup, 2019 could be the year for AMD. Editors' Recommendations