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Swiss prosecutors are seeking a four-year jail sentence for Trafigura’s former chief operating officer and $156mn in compensation and penalties from the company over an alleged “textbook” conspiracy to corrupt a public official.
Trafigura and Michael Wainwright have been on trial at Switzerland’s federal criminal court for the past week, in a landmark case centred around Trafigura’s lucrative push into Angola between 2009 and 2011.
The federal prosecutor alleges that the company paid more than €5mn of bribes through third parties to an Angolan government official in exchange for oil bunkerage and shipping contracts.
It is the first such case against a commodity trading giant to be brought in Switzerland, the industry’s longtime centre of operations, and the first globally against a top executive in one of the companies.
Wainwright was the “linchpin of the scheme”, prosecutor Grégoire Mégevand told the court on Monday, in five hours of closing arguments. Trafigura’s COO for nearly 16 years had “used methods worthy of a seasoned criminal” to disguise his activities, said Mégevand.
Prosecutors allege that the scheme involved the use of multiple intermediaries to “camouflage” the bribery scheme, and shield Trafigura and Wainwright from discovery.
They said Wainwright took delivery of USB sticks in envelopes containing account details about payments from one of the people he used, and sought to make sure data was wiped from such sticks afterwards.
The intermediary, known as H, was a former Trafigura employee who the court last week heard had been, in his own words, called “Mr Non-Compliant” by Trafigura’s former head Claude Dauphin, and had taken on an outside role to “do the company a big service”.
Dauphin died in 2015 and is not a party to the case.
H was, said the prosecutor, an arms-length “financial controller” of the scheme who made sure Trafigura’s alleged bribes were paid through the right channel. Wainwright kept in “regular and meticulous” contact with him, the court heard.
Wainwright and Trafigura’s lawyers have meanwhile argued that the case is built on unreliable testimony, and have also pointed to the failure to indict or call for the testimony of two of the executives who allegedly ran the scheme, so that they could face cross-examination.
One was H. The other was Trafigura’s former board member Mariano Ferraz, nicknamed “Mr Angola”. Ferraz was chief executive of Trafigura’s jointly owned Angolan venture, DT Trading.
Ferraz was convicted in Brazil in 2018 in a separate corruption case. Trafigura’s lawyers have argued that a secret deal was struck to reduce his sentence in return for incriminating testimony against Trafigura. Plea deals are illegal under Swiss law.
The company also argues that it had robust compliance mechanisms in place at the time, and could therefore not be guilty of having not adequately tried to prevent corruption, as prosecutor’s claim.
Former chief financial officer and current non-executive board member Pierre Lorinet and deputy compliance chief Michael Firth last week testified to the company’s commitment to compliance.
Trafigura faces a maximum penalty of SFr5mn ($5.7mn) if found guilty of not having strong enough controls to stop corruption. Prosecutors have also asked for $151mn of profits to be forfeited, adding that they thought the fine was a “drop in the bucket” for Trafigura.
The Angolan official who allegedly received the alleged bribes, Paulo Gouveia Junior, is also in the dock, as is one of the intermediaries who was allegedly used by to pay him, Thierry Plojoux, who ran a company called Consultco.
The three accused, alongside Trafigura, will present their closing defence arguments on Tuesday.
