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The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the nation’s regulator of oil and other futures markets, has charged crude oil speculators for artificially driving up the price of oil during 2008, when oil reached a record $147 a barrel on a speculative bubble that helped crash the global economy. James Dyer and Nicholas Wildgoose, former BP traders who were working for oil trading house Arcadia/Parnon, were charged for a scheme to hoard oil, make a “s***load of money,” and then dump it in an “inevitable puking,” according to emails acquired by the CFTC. The Financial Times reports:

The US commodities regulator has charged a trading house and two individuals with manipulating oil prices in 2008 by allegedly amassing dominant positions in the physical market that created the impression of a shortage.

When oil prices hit a record $147 a barrel in July 2008, the Bush administration leaned on Saudi Arabia to pump more crude in hopes that a flood of new crude would drive the price down. The Saudis complied, but not before warning that oil already was plentiful and that Wall Street speculation, not a shortage of oil, was driving up prices.

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al Naimi even told U.S. Ambassador Ford Fraker that the kingdom would have difficulty finding customers for the additional crude, according to an account laid out in a confidential State Department cable dated Sept. 28, 2008,

“Saudi Arabia can’t just put crude out on the market,” the cable quotes Naimi as saying. Instead, Naimi suggested, “speculators bore significant responsibility for the sharp increase in oil prices in the last few years,” according to the cable.