Trafigura executive found guilty
A Swiss court says Mike Wainwright orchestrated $5-million bribe to an Angolan official.
On Friday last week, a court in Switzerland found Mike Wainwright – the former chief operating officer of Trafigura – guilty of corruption. He has been sentenced to 32 months in prison.
The court found Wainwright had organised the payment of $5-million in bribes to a senior official in Angola’s state oil company, Sonangol, using a shell company in the Virgin Islands – a tax haven – in an effort to disguise the payments. The payments were made via a middleman known as “Mr Non-Compliant”, prosecutors said.
The bribes gave Trafigura a lucrative near-monopoly on the trade of Angolan petroleum products – and denied Angolans a competitive price for their natural resource.
Trafigura, one of the world’s largest traders of commodities such as oil and metals, was also held liable for the crime and ordered to pay a fine of $3-million and compensation of $145.6-million.
According to Bloomberg, Wainwright is “the first senior executive at a major commodity-trading house to be convicted of corruption”. Wainwright maintains his innocence, and is planning to appeal. And Trafigura can afford the fine. The company makes its money by buying commodities and then selling them for a profit – and it makes lots and lots of money. Last year, it raked in $2.8-billion in profit. In 2023, that figure was more than $7-billion.
The company has been repeatedly implicated in major corruption scandals, and fined by various regulatory authorities around the world – but, until now, the people who commit the crimes on its behalf have walked free.