Jim Armitage: Key Group Holdings has pulled off one of canniest short-selling punts of the year

Hats off to Sunil Jagwani, the financier behind Key Group Holdings (Cayman).

Despite the bit in the brackets, Sunil’s business is a hedge fund apparently run out of the Bahamas with a parent office in Texas and London staff in Marylebone, including exotically named advisers like Albina Sadykova and Isaac Kong, according to the FCA register.

Filings show Key is the City’s biggest winner by far from the rout in mining stocks, having shorted 14 million shares in Anglo American in one gulp last week, trousering a back-of-the-envelope gain of £16 million and counting.

Crispin Odey and others have been shorting Anglo for ages, but Key’s sudden raid has to be one of the canniest short punts of the year.

At the same time Jagwani upped his short on Amec Foster Wheeler (profit since then £1.4 million) and Antofagasta (with a £550,000 gain).

Sadly, nobody from Key returned my calls and emails.

They’re probably all on the beach in Nassau (or Cayman, in brackets), counting the dollars.