Not Just a Belgian Court Case: Why the Nyrstar Forgery Investigation Should Worry Governments Everywhere

Anyone who wants a clear, no-nonsense primer on what has recently happened in the Antwerp’ criminal proceedings involving Nyrstar should read a piece published by Discovery Alert, an Australian mining-news outlet with no obvious stake in the outcome. Their article, "Nyrstar Forgery Investigation in Antwerp: What Investors Should Know", does a rather good job of laying out, briefly and in plain language, the state of the legal proceedings and the weight of the three allegations Nyrstar is now facing. We recommend reading it in full (via the link below). It is written for an Australian investor audience, making something obvious that Nyrstar consistently tried to obscure: this is not, and never was, a purely Belgian affair.

Under suspicion in a criminal investigation

Nyrstar has been formally placed under suspicion by the examining magistrate's office in Antwerp on three distinct fronts: suspected forgery, the use of falsified annual accounts, and misuse of corporate assets. That single sentence, dry as it reads, is why this case belongs on the desk of regulators and ministries well beyond Belgium.

Any one of these three allegations, standing alone, would already represent serious criminal exposure. Found together, as they have been here, they point to something considerably more serious still: a potentially connected pattern of conduct running across documentation, financial reporting and asset management all at once.

The Discovery Alert piece is right to stress a point readers will understand instinctively: an investigating judge does not place a listed company under formal suspicion on a whim. Bacause forgery, false accounts and asset misuse, found together rather than in isolation, is about as serious as a corporate criminal file gets.

Cross boarder impact of the Nyrstar case

For readers outside of Belgium, this may all feel like a domestic legal drama playing out in a local courthouse. It is anything but. Nyrstar's smelters in Australia, its zinc plant in the Netherlands, and its refining operations in France all depend on the integrity of the corporate structure sitting above them.

Should the investigation ultimately lead to a conviction, the consequences would not be confined to fines or reputational embarrassment. If the 2019 restructuring that stripped Nyrstar NV of virtually all its operating assets and handed them to Trafigura is ultimately found to rest on these three allegations, the legal basis for that transfer itself comes under direct threat: up to and including nullification. This would imply the operating assets could have to be transferred back to Nyrstar NV, the company still listed on Euronext Brussels and still, in law, owned by its shareholders.

Hence, governments in Canberra, The Hague and Paris who (might) have been approached by Trafigura to allocate state aid to Nyrstar, have every reason to ask the same question Belgian minority shareholders have been asking for years: on what basis, exactly, were the assets now generating jobs, tax revenue and strategic mineral supply in their own countries transferred out of a listed company and into the hands of a privately owned commodity trader?

Bacause a forgery investigation that calls the legitimacy of that transfer into question is not a Belgian problem alone. It is a live question for every government whose critical-minerals supply chain now runs through a Trafigura-controlled asset base.

Nyrstar's careful silence

One section of the Discovery Alert article deserves particular attention: the chapter on how Nyrstar is navigating disclosure. The company has said publicly that it is cooperating fully with the investigation, while adding that it cannot yet comment because it has not been granted access to the criminal file. That caution is not accidental.

As the article observes, any statement by the company that could be read as an admission, or that risks prejudicing the ongoing investigation, exposes both the company and its lawyers to real legal risk. It is a lawyerly way of saying that Nyrstar's own advisers believe the company has genuine legal exposure to protect.

Equally, it implies that every word chosen in its 8 June disclosure that the company had been placed under suspicion, was calibrated with that exposure in mind, not with transparency towards its shareholders in mind. The deflecting responses by the board of directors at the 30 June annual shareholder meeting reinforce that observation.

A governance failure, not just a legal one

The article closes with a useful list of four governance frameworks that multi-jurisdiction metals operators should, in theory, have in place: centralised financial controls with local compliance oversight, an independent audit committee with direct access to external auditors, regular third-party compliance reviews, and functioning whistleblower channels.

This list functions almost as an indictment in itself. Because if those four safeguards had genuinely been operating at Nyrstar before 2019, it is difficult to see how a privately owned trading house like Trafigura could ever have ended up walking away with virtually the entire operating business of a publicly listed company, leaving minority shareholders holding with an empty shell.

The Antwerp investigation is, at its heart, a governance case as much as a criminal one; and it is precisely that governance failure, allegedly enabled by forgery, false accounts and misused assets, that sits at the origin of the very restructuring Nyrstar Collective continues to fight to have reversed.

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