(MENAFN- Swissinfo) The days of handing out bribes to secure commodity contracts are over, the heads of the world's biggest trading companies said, after a series of US bribery scandals put the sector under intense scrutiny.
This content was published on April 10, 2024 - 13:53 4 minutes Shotaro Tani and Tom Wilson in Lausanne,
financial Times
Speaking at the FT commodities Global Summit in Lausanne, the heads of Vitol, Trafigura and Gunvor each said they had overhauled trading and compliance processes since the 2010s and that bribery and corruption has no place in commodity trading today.
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“We've tried very hard over the past few years to re-engineer some of those processes and policies,” said Russell Hardy, chief executive officer of Vitol, the world's largest independent oil trader.
The firm, which agreed to pay more than $160 million (CHF145 million) to authorities in the US and Brazil in 2020 in relation to bribery charges in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico, has sought to“influence the culture” of its employees to“embrace that compliance is a necessary part of their thinking and everything that they do”, he said.
Rotterdam-based Vitol, whose chief executive sits in London, has had“conversations with a lot of [its] stakeholders to impress upon them the efforts that we're putting in”, he added.
Never say never
Large-scale trading of goods like oil and critical minerals has in the past relied on well-connected intermediaries to win business leading to corrupt deals that have drawn the scrutiny of US and European prosecutors in recent years.
A former Vitol trader was convicted in February in the US on corruption charges relating to more than $1 million in bribes he paid to officials in Ecuador and Mexico between 2015 and 2020.
Rival Trafigura in March pleaded guilty to charges by US prosecutors of bribery in Brazil between 2003 and 2014, agreeing to pay more than $120 million in fines and forfeited profits.
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