Traders Bet Big Minutes Before Trump’s Iran Post. Then A Top Regulator’s Adviser Reportedly Stepped In

A top adviser to the commodities regulator’s chairman told career staff to retract a referral over possible insider trading in oil bets, Bloomberg reported Tuesday.

Analysts in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) Division of Market Oversight referred trades made around President Donald Trump’s March 23 reversal on Iran to the agency’s enforcement division, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Mel Gunewardena, a senior adviser to CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, then told a supervisor to retract the referral, according to the outlet.

In a two-minute window starting at 6:49 a.m. on March 23, traders sold contracts equal to at least 6 million barrels of Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude, more than 8.5 times the volume traded at that time of morning over the prior week, Bloomberg reported. About 15 minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social that he was backing off his threat to strike Iranian power plants, and Brent prices fell as much as 14%.

The Justice Department and the offices of Republican Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas, who chairs the Senate Agriculture Committee, and Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

“The CFTC does not confirm or deny any investigation,” CFTC spokesperson Zach Fulton said in a statement to the DCNF.

“The fact that this trading preceded a headline driven sell-off means that either someone got very lucky or knew something,” Tim Skirrow, head of derivatives at Energy Aspects, told Bloomberg.

Gunewardena later assembled his own team to conduct a new analysis of the trading, and by July the supervisor he had told to retract the referral had left the agency, Bloomberg reported. Other members of the team resigned or were moved to other roles, though it is not clear whether the changes were related, according to the outlet.

An agency official told Bloomberg that because the original findings were U.S.-focused, the agency decided to broaden the review internationally, a task Gunewardena, a former Goldman Sachs and State Street executive, was best placed to lead.

“Conspicuously large and consistently prescient trades should always be subject to oversight and review since all market participants must play by the same rules,” EJ Antoni, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Policy Studies, said in a statement to the DCNF. “Abandoning that principle shakes confidence in our commodity and financial markets, which are the best in the world.”