Terrence Duffy, executive chairman of CME Group, testified that an auditor from CME Group took part in a phone call in which an MF Global employee signaled that Corzine was aware of a $175 million loan made to a European affiliate of the brokerage firm, using funds from customer segregated accounts, just days before its bankruptcy, the news service reported.

Corzine has denied giving any instructions to misuse customer funds.

MF Global announced losses and was hit by credit rating downgrades near the end of October. It was declared bankrupt on 31 October, and it has since emerged that hundreds of millions of customer funds were diverted from segregated accounts.

Meanwhile, according to a written testimony by Duffy before the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry, the group’s auditors made unannounced visits to MF Global on 27 October to review daily segregation reports and found these intact. The segregation reports received up until and including 27 October “asserted that the firm remained in full compliance with segregation requirements,” said Duffy.

However, CME’s auditors returned to the broker-dealer on 30 October after learning from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that the draft segregation report for Friday 28 October, submitted to the CFTC, showed a $900 million shortfall in segregation caused by an “accounting error.”