Ex-Gunvor Manager Convicted of Bribery Over Oil Deals

(Bloomberg) — A former manager at Gunvor Group was found guilty by a Swiss court of bribing public officials to secure oil contracts in Africa, a second win in less than a month for Swiss prosecutors cracking down on corruption in the commodity-trading industry. 

G., an ex-trade finance executive at the firm who can’t be named under Swiss reporting restrictions, was handed a two-year suspended sentence, the Federal Criminal Court said in a statement on Thursday. He was also ordered to pay compensation to the state of $950,000 and pay its legal fees that topped $50,000.

Prosecutors had charged him with making payments worth $35.5 million to public officials in the Republic of Congo to obtain financing and delivery of crude oil from the African nation.

G.’s guilty verdict follows last month’s conviction of commodities firm Trafigura and Mike Wainwright, its former chief operating officer, over more than $5 million in bribes that netted about $151 million in Angola. He denies the charges and is appealing the verdict. 

For Gunvor, it’s not its first brush with Swiss justice. Another of its former oil traders was given an 18-month suspended sentence in 2018 after bribing public officials to secure oil cargoes from the Congo and Ivory Coast. Then in 2019, the Geneva-based trading company paid $95 million to end a Swiss probe into the company’s involvement. Those two cases revealed evidence that led Swiss prosecutors to pursue G. 

Gunvor declined to comment on the verdict. G.’s lawyer wasn’t immediately reachable after the verdict. 

The ruling represents a win “in the area of ​​international corruption, a strategic priority,” the Swiss attorney general’s office said in a statement. 

Under Swiss law, a verdict is only considered binding until all appeals have been exhausted, meaning that unless in unusual circumstances, those convicted of white-collar crimes don’t serve a prison sentence until that process has ended. 

Gunvor’s legal woes aren’t limited to Switzerland. Less than a year ago, it pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $662 million to resolve US and Swiss charges over corruption in Ecuador. 

In the current Congo case, prosecutors pointed to more than 35 payments ranging from as little as $150,000 to as much as $3.5 million, made to middlemen via banks in Geneva and Brussels, that they alleged were at the heart of the bribery scheme. 

Prosecutors pointed in their indictment to email exchanges between G. and his former colleague convicted in 2018, that they say demonstrated G. knew he was generating false receipts for the millions paid in bribes, but that the men needed to be more compelling to pass muster with the banks handling them. 

“Try to use different wordings in these bills please,” G. wrote to his former colleague in 2011, otherwise “it becomes a bit ‘obvious’ and bank compliance could come down on us.” 

G., the prosecutors said in summing up their case against him, left no doubt in those emails emails to C. “that he was fully aware of and accepted the corruptive nature of the payments.” 

–With assistance from Archie Hunter.

(Updates with prosecutor’s comment in seventh paragraph)

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