Vitol: The Secretive Trading Giant Minting Fortunes For Its Employees

(MENAFN- Swissinfo) The commodity house is among world's most profitable companies and has returned $20 billion to senior staff over past three years. This content was published on September 3, 2025 - 09:36 10 minutes The Financial Times

Across two floors of an unremarkable office block tucked between Buckingham Palace and London's gritty Victoria coach station sits one of the most profitable but least known companies in the world.

Commodity trader Vitol has made annual net profits averaging more than $12 billion over the past three years, representing approximately $6 million per employee, and returned nearly $20 billion through its share scheme to its almost 600 most senior staff.

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The bumper payouts for employee-shareholders follow a period of sky-high returns after Vitol capitalised better than competitors on disruptions in energy markets that started with the Covid pandemic in 2020 and continued with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The privately held group does not publish its results but accounts filed by Vitol's holding company in Luxembourg show its earnings soared from $2.3 billion in 2019 to a record $15.1 billion in 2022, $13.2 billion in 2023 and $8.7 billion last year.

Founded almost 60 years ago in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, Vitol is a giant in the energy trading industry. Last year it traded more oil every day than the combined consumption of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK. Yet few people outside the sector would recognise its name.“Vitol is different from the other trading houses,” said Jean-François Lambert, a former senior commodities banker who has dealt extensively with the company.“It is older and much stronger financially but it's so discreet that nobody knows about them.”

Some competitors see Vitol as the gold standard in an industry that has historically prided itself on discretion and profit-taking. Others view it as a ruthless operator willing to push every angle to the limit to take market share.

Current and former employees, however, describe a collegiate corporate culture in which clashes between senior traders are rare despite the large sums at stake.

“There was surprisingly a certain amount of humility,” said one former employee who spent several years at the company.“No one was flashy, no one was talking about how much money they made.”

Key to that culture, current and former employees say, is a partnership structure in which no single employee has a more than 5% stake.

The model started with Henk Viëtor and Jacques Detiger, who founded the company in 1966 trading fuel oil barges up the Rhine, and has expanded steadily since then“from two, to five, to eight, to nearly 600”, chief executive Russell Hardy said in an interview at Vitol's headquarters.

Rivals such as Mercuria and Gunvor, both established in the early 2000s, are still run by founders who control large majority stakes.

Hardy joined Vitol from BP in 1993 and seven years ago took over as chief executive from Ian Taylor, a swashbuckling dealmaker and establishment man with close ties to the UK Conservative party who is said to have known every employee's name. Taylor died in 2020 after a long illness.

Hardy sees himself as more mathematical, with an eye for detail and a greater focus on Vitol's trading and operations, and said successful trading houses ultimately needed both skillsets.

He runs Vitol with an eight-person executive board including long-standing chief financial officer Jeff Dellapina, head of oil Mark Couling, head of LNG Pablo Galante Escobar, head of US gas and power Dylan Seff, Americas boss Ben Marshall, head of Asia Kieran Gallagher and Asia CFO Jay Ng.

Under the board there were“50 to 70 sort-of business heads” running Vitol's various trading desks and divisions.“That key team is then given a reasonable amount of latitude to run their businesses and they enjoy that,” Hardy said.

Executives who have joined Vitol from listed oil majors such as Shell, which employs almost 100,000 people worldwide, said they were stunned initially by the company's lean operations. Vitol's main corporate entity, which largely consists of its trading operation, has about 1,800 staff, although Hardy estimated that the total workforce could be as high as 20,000 if all those employed by subsidiaries and joint ventures were included.

The lean structure has helped many of Vitol's staff become wildly rich. Last year alone the company returned $10.6bn to its employee owners through share repurchases, representing an average of more than $17.5 million per partner, although many senior executives are likely to have received much more. Trafigura, its closest rival, has 13,000 employees and more than 1,400 shareholders, who shared $2bn through their share scheme last year and $5.9 billion a year earlier.

The size of the payouts to individual partners at Vitol is discretionary.“If you don't get the balance right, you can't attract people,” Hardy said.“And if you create an incentive for people to leave or retire, that's also not good management.” However, in all but“a handful of cases”, Vitol traders were motivated by professional success rather than money, he added. Vitol's accounts do not break down profits by division but revenue figures show the steady growth of natural gas and power trading, alongside its traditional oil business. Last year the company traded $228bn of oil, $69 billion of gas and $22 billion of power. In 2022, as energy prices soared amid Russia's assault on Ukraine, Vitol's revenues were just under half a trillion dollars, more than any company worldwide except Walmart, according to figures compiled by Fortune.

One distinctive feature of Vitol's business, bankers said, was that rather than using traditional commodity trade finance to fund individual trades, Vitol had long preferred to raise debt centrally and then use that single pool of liquidity to finance its trading activities. As a result, it depends far less on its lenders than other traders, which is also a reason it can disclose less about its business to the public.

Its most recent end-of-year accounts showed total equity of $30.7bn and debts of $3.6 billion. Trafigura, by comparison, had total equity of $16.3 billion and debts of $31 billion, although the higher borrowing partly reflects Trafigura's larger metals business, which requires more working capital.

Vitol's financial strength meant that coming into the energy crisis in 2022, when volatility caused many trading houses to face huge margin calls, it had the cash on hand to capitalise on the dislocations in the market, according to Lambert.“The secret sauce in trading is your pool of cash,” he said.“You can take advantage of any situation if you have the right amount of cash available.” Vitol's accounts show it had $9.3 billion of cash and short-term deposits available at the end of 2021.

“They're a class act and when the market conditions are right, class acts are the ones that make money,” said one senior commodities banker who is well acquainted with Vitol.

While portions of recent profits have been used to reward staff and strengthen the balance sheet - shareholder equity has more than doubled since 2021 - the rest has been ploughed back into assets. In the past three years Vitol has acquired the largest refinery in the Mediterranean, BP's retail fuel network in Turkey, South African downstream oil company Engen and agreed a $1.65 billion deal for part of an oil project in Côte d'Ivoire and an LNG development in the Republic of Congo.

Such dealmaking has led some bankers to speculate that the company might consider a bid for parts of Hardy's struggling former employer BP. However, despite the trader's recent growth, any acquisition larger than $5 billion would still be an“extreme stretch”, Hardy said,“both in terms of financial commitment and in terms of the resource needed from inside the company to go and manage this new $5 billion-$10 billion thing”.

At least 70-80% of Vitol's“effort and capital” remains focused on trading activity and Hardy expects it to stay that way.“We want to remain agile,” he said.

This was partly achieved, he added, by ensuring that Vitol's subsidiaries and joint ventures, such as Vivo Energy, were run as“largely independent companies” with their own chief executives, brands and culture.

It has not all been smooth sailing. In February last year, former Vitol trader Javier Aguilar was convicted 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.

“The specific point in Javier's case is clearly unauthorised payments,” Hardy said, adding that the company had taken several measures since 2020 to tighten up payment systems and compliance procedures.

In the past 12 months several long-standing members of Vitol's executive board have retired, including former chief investment officer Gérard Delsad and rainmaker Chris Bake. But the transition to a new-look senior team has been smooth, insiders say.

If Vitol faces a challenge right now, it might be only how to cope with making slightly less money. Hardy expects profits to settle somewhere between the roughly $2 billion a year it used to make and the $9 billion it has averaged since 2020.

“People are just adjusting to the fact that we're flying a bit slower than we used to,” Hardy said.“You've got to work a bit harder for the opportunities.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025

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