Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Hello and welcome back to Patrick Boyle on finance. I have a really good story for you guys today.

It's a little bit complicated, but it's well worth understanding. Today's story

includes a bunch of overlapping scandals, mistakes and frauds. It's tied to businesses on almost

every continent, but the whole lot revolves around a controversial Australian billionaire named

Lex Greensell. Let's see if we can unwrap this story because it's a big

one and it's getting bigger. There are echoes of the subprime mortgage crisis in the

Green Sill story with really bad loans being passed off as good to an unsuspecting end customer.

We've seen large financial institutions collapse in the past, but these collapses have

usually been after a big fall in financial markets.

There's that famous Warren Buffett quote that only when the tide goes out do you see who's

been swimming naked.

Some of you might want to avert your eyes for the rest of the story, as while the tide has not yet gone out, you're going to see a lot of naked swimmers in here.

This meltdown is quite different to the ones from the past, as I can't really think of another example of a collapse like this, occurring within a percent or two of all-time market highs.

I don't think the story is very well explained in the press right now, largely just due

to its complexity, so hopefully you'll find this useful.

At the very centre of all of these issues, we have Green Sill Capital, an Australian company,

mostly based out of London, with lots of embarrassing

ties to the British government.

They're not really regulated by the FCA, the British financial regulator, other than for

anti-money laundering.

Next up, we have Sanjeev Gupta, a bankrupt British Indian commodities trader and industrialist, and his firm

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