Aurubis CEO Roland Harings sees a new form of organised crime in metal thefts. Speaking with the German newspaper "Hamburger Abendblatt", he said that in the past, criminals had sought to steal pure precious metals such as gold and silver. "This would be all but impossible nowadays due to high security standards," according to the Mr Harings. Thefts had now taken on "a new dimension" as criminals were now targeting metallurgical processing operations. "This is organised crime," he said.
Hamburg-based copper producer and recycling specialist Aurubis is believed to have been the victim of metal theft twice this year. The damage from the most recent case, which was made public last Thursday, could amount to a sum in the low hundreds of millions of euros.
According to Mr Harings, Aurubis processes about 1 million tonnes of scrap per year. "When a truck drives up [to one of our sites], samples are taken and analysed in our laboratory to see how much recyclable material the delivery contains. Suppliers are paid on this basis." The value of a delivery is calculated based on the composition of representative sample, he said.
"We suspect that the sampling process and the in-house analysis of the samples were manipulated so that the values of the deliveries were set higher than they actually were," Mr Haring said. "And those non-existent metals had been paid for," he added. He explained that the "special inventory" currently underway would identify the materials for which there were shortfalls and quantify how large the discrepancies between the book volumes and the actual volumes are. This internal review is expected to be completed before the end of September.
Aurubis staff "very likely" involved
According to Mr Harings, it is "very likely that Aurubis employees were actively involved in the manipulation of samples". Definitively establishing whether this was the case was an objective of the investigation that was being carried out in cooperation with the State Criminal Police Office.
Along with the discovery of the inventory shortfalls last week, the copper recycler withdrew its annual forecast for the 2022/23 financial year, which will end on 30 September, as did the steel group Salzgitter, Aurubis's largest single shareholder. Salzgitter holds nearly 30 per cent of the copper group's shares.
Earlier this year, Aurubis announced that it had been the victim of a series of thefts involving intermediate products containing precious metals. The loss from that theft, which is not believed to be connected to the most recent incident, was estimated at €20m (dpa / EUWID).
