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Trafigura paid nearly €5mn in bribes to an Angolan official through an intermediary who was dubbed “Mr Non-Compliant” by the commodity trader’s founder, Claude Dauphin, Swiss prosecutors have alleged.
The Swiss indictment accuses Trafigura Beheer BV, the former parent company of Trafigura Group, of failing to prevent acts of serious corruption between 2009 and 2011. It also accuses Trafigura’s former chief operating officer, Mike Wainwright, who retired earlier this year, of bribery.
The Swiss federal prosecutor announced the charges against Wainwright and Trafigura Beheer BV last year, but details were withheld until now, as is customary in Swiss legal proceedings.
Dauphin, who died of cancer in 2015, was for decades one of the most powerful figures in the global trade in raw materials. The indictment marks the first time he has been named by prosecutors as having masterminded the alleged scheme.
While numerous cases of bribery, corruption and money laundering have been brought by enforcement authorities against major commodity trading firms in countries across the world in recent years, none have so far directly implicated those at the very top of such organisations.
The 150-page indictment, a copy of which was unsealed on Monday and obtained by the Financial Times, alleges that some of Trafigura’s most senior executives were intimately involved in a criminal conspiracy to win lucrative government contracts in Angola by corrupting a public official between 2009 and 2011.
The trial is set to open on December 2 in Switzerland’s central criminal court in Bellinzona.
The indictment said that €4.3mn was paid into bank accounts in Geneva opened in the name of the Angolan civil servant Paulo Gouveia Junior and a further $604,000 in cash was handed to him in Angola. The contents of the indictment were first reported by Bloomberg.
In a statement, Trafigura defended its measures to prevent corruption and said it intended to fight the allegations in court.
“TBBV’s [Trafigura Beheer’s] anti-bribery and anti-corruption controls and compliance programme in place at the relevant time have been externally reviewed and assessed to have met legal requirements and international good practice standards applicable at that time,” the company said.
Gouveia was at the time of the alleged crime the chief executive officer of Sonangol Distribuidora, a subsidiary of Angola’s state-owned oil company Sonangol, which is responsible for marketing and shipping the African nation’s petroleum products.
Gouveia travelled to Geneva on April 7, 2008, the case states, and bills show his overnight stay in the luxury Four Seasons Hôtel des Bergues was charged to Trafigura, the indictment said.
Instructions to the bank Crédit Agricole to designate him as the beneficiary of a Virgin Islands-domiciled corporate shell, into which Trafigura had begun to siphon money, were sent on Trafigura-headed letter paper, the indictment alleges.
Gouveia would go on to sign multiyear chartering contracts between Angolan state entities and Trafigura worth $143.7mn in profits for the trading house, according to the prosecutors.
Gouveia’s lawyer declined to comment on behalf of his client.
Swiss prosecutors said the whole scheme was managed from the very top of Trafigura and that the official was even invited to Dauphin’s Geneva home for dinner. Wainwright played a key role in organising the payments, putting his signature to documents involved, according to the indictment.
The transactions were complex, multi-staged, and run through another person, who was a former employee of Trafigura. The person, whose name has been kept anonymous according to Swiss reporting restrictions, ran a consultancy in Switzerland that had Trafigura as its only client.
The prosecutor’s indictment cites an audio file obtained from a mobile phone in which Dauphin is said to refer to the individual as “Mr Non-Compliant” because he could do things which were not internally permissible at Trafigura.
Daniel Kinzer and Yoann Lambert, lawyers for Wainwright, said their client “entirely rejects” the allegations against him.
“We will be presenting a robust defence. [Wainwright] has full confidence the court will find the allegations to be unfounded and will dismiss the case made against him by the prosecution,” they said.
