But, frankly, that is not the most remarkable oddity of the contents of correspondence, which is also written in the name of a junior competitor and the American metals industry union and was sent last Thursday to the US Department of Commerce and the Office of the US Trade Representative.

Just for interest's sake, that competitor is an entity called Magnitude 7 Metals. It owns a mothballed 260,000-tonne smelter in New Madrid, Missouri. As it turns out, M7M is owned by ARG International, a business that was created back in 2013 by a high-flying and very wealthy former Glencore aluminium trader Matt Lucke. And, as if to prove the apple never falls far from the tree, HQ for Lucke's new business is a few streets away from Glencore Central in Zug.

The pitch by Century, M7M and the United Steel Workers Union claimed that the effects of the "recent sanctions announced against Russian oligarchs and aluminium producers illustrates" why Trump's aluminium tariffs need to be more liberally applied to US competitor nations.

On April 6, in a move that has had far more immediate effect and holds more long-term implications for aluminium markets than the threat of import sanctions or quota, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control took action unprecedented in its breadth by installing a community of Russian billionaires, companies and government officials on the US list of "specially designated nationals" (SDNs).

Designation means too that US citizen or resident companies must sell debt or equity they hold in the sanctioned entities but that those investments cannot be sold back to the issuing party. The SDN regime also carries secondary and extra-territorial powers that allow the US to sanction non-US individual and companies that aid trading by listed entities. The penalties for failing those sanctions range from visa bans to blocking access to US dollars.

Now, arguably the highest profile target of the new SDNs is Oleg Deripaska and his two international fronts, Hong Kong listed Rusal and the London listed EN+. From May 7, US citizens will not be able to own debt or shares in Rusal and from June 5, US companies will not be able to buy Rusal products.

Arguably too there is no individual western company whose working life has been made more immediately complicated by the stunning US decision to target the Russian economy than Glasenberg's Glencore.

Glencore owns 8.75 per cent of Rusal and it has off-take agreements covering 2.07mt of the Russian's aluminium. Last year Rusal sold $US2.4 billion ($3.2 billion) worth of aluminium to Glencore, which is equivalent to nearly 5 per cent of the Swiss trader's metals marketing revenue. Barclays Capital recently assessed that returns on trading that metal might be pretty marginal, suggesting that it might contribute a relatively spare $US48 million to the bottomline.


In the wake of the new US ignominy force on Deripaska and ahead of its migration across international markets, Glasenberg became the first of four directors to resign from the Rusal board.

Then, the news that the London Metals Market would no longer allow Rusal aluminium to enter its warehouses, Glencore called force majeure on an unspecified quantum of aluminium supply.

Whether or not Glencore needs to divest its Rusal position to protect it access to US markets remains uncertain. And while the unknowns of existing investment and marketing arrangements with Rusal are not limited to Glencore, there is a view that the quite particular risks the Anglo-Swiss entity faces serve to highlight the risk of Glasenberg's Russian opportunism.

Glencore's Russia House is not limited, of course, to Rusal. Over recent years Glasenberg has forged ever closer trading links with the Russian oil industry.

Glencore markets 220,000 barrels a day of Rosneft oil and Glasenberg played a pivotal role in the oil giant's 2016 refinancing. Glencore currently owns a 0.57 per cent stake in Rosneft, which is worth about $US300 million and a 25 per cent stake (worth maybe $600 million) in another top 10 Russian producer, Russneft. As a result of that arrangement, Glencore markets all of Russneft's export volumes, which run to 57,000 a day of oil equivalent production.

There is a view that the Russian oil business, Rosneft in particular, is simply too important to the global energy mix for it to be targeted by US sanctions. But there has been oil market speculation fuelled by this potential, realistic or not.

Glencore's alignment with Rusal stretches back to 2007 when Glasenberg flicked his alumina assets into the aluminium business that had been reassembled by Deripaska and another oligarch, Viktor Vekselberg, from the former state owned instrument. This reformation was no easy affair. Indeed, the notorious aluminium wars of the 1990s were infamously bloody. Like Deripaska, Vekselberg was is on the newly expanded US SDN list.

There are those that refused to deal with Deripaska through his emergence into international aluminium markets. Sometime around 1998, for example, Deripaska approached Brian Gilbertson at Billiton to consider merging their respective aluminium businesses. Gilberton sent Hungarian-born Mike Salamon to investigate the approach. Salamon eventually scotched the proposal after meeting with Deripaska and reportedly taking "a visceral dislike" to him.


Anyway, back to the Century Three and their views on why the US aluminium sector requires very special protection from foreign competition.

The proposition appeals to be that the rapidity of the global market's move from over-supply to being short metal and raw materials stands proof of the risk the US runs in relying on foreigners to supply aluminium.

"Reliance on foreign supply creates unnecessary vulnerabilities and can be unreliable in a crisis despite the best of intentions," the letter claimed.

"Without broad comprehensive relief with limited narrow exemptions to ensure the full amount of US capacity restarts, the President's national security goals will not be met."

That is because, without putting firm quotas on imports the result of the strategic tariff exemptions will be that foreign production will surge into US markets.

"Market analysts agree that if significant producers were completely exempted, as a pure commodity, virtually all of the aluminium produced in exempted countries will flow here duty free, making the tariff ineffective and thereby preventing US producers from increasing production to recapture lost market share," the industry letter said.

"Non-US producers in those markets are already indicating they have plans to do just that," it was claimed.

The background here is that almost immediately after confirming that the US would introduce a 25 per cent tariff on imported steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, the White House moved to ease tension by offering exemption to allies in defence (Australia and Canada, for example) and trading nations and blocks of good US standing (Korea, Argentina, Brazil and Europe).


Then came news that those exemptions would only last until April 30 and that by May 1 the US would require agreement on nation-specific import quotas.

At the same time though, US trade minister Steven Ciobo said that the agreement between Trump and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that specifically exempts Australian steel from the tariff would escape the quota review.

"As the United States has acknowledged, the US could not have a fairer trade relationship than it does with Australia," Ciobo said.

But he made no mention of aluminium. Then again, why would he. The Australian aluminium industry produces about 1.5 million tonnes of metal annually and only about 4 per cent of it finds its way to the US.

From a purely Australian perspective then this is more about policy, precedent and the need for a trading nation to promote and defend free markets. With that in mind, it is just that little bit odd that Glencore, Australia's biggest coal miner, might find itself working directly against our national interest.