Latest news with #Trafigura
Reuters
3 days ago
- Business
- Reuters
Vitol paid out $10.6 billion to shareholders in buybacks in 2024
LONDON, July 28 (Reuters) - Global commodity trading house Vitol Group paid $10.6 billion to employees who own shares in the company, through its annual share buyback scheme in 2024, company filings seen by Reuters showed. Vitol's $10.6 billion in buyback payments were up from the $6.4 billion it paid in 2023 - extending its highest ever. Buybacks rose in 2024 as a continuation of record earnings even though profits started to drop from all-time highs. Vitol made around $8-8.5 billion in net profit last year, down from $13 billion in 2023 and $15 billion in 2022. Vitol and rival global commodity traders such as Trafigura and Gunvor made lower net profit in their 2024 financial year, as markets stabilised after a period of turmoil in 2022-2023 as trading houses made record earnings during Europe's energy crisis and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As well as funding its share buybacks, Vitol has been putting its bumper earnings towards investments in upstream and downstream assets across the globe. In 2024 Vitol acquired Italian refining company Saras. It has also diversified from its traditionally oil-heavy portfolio, increasing its activities in the natural gas trading business, as well as coal and metals. The total equity attributable to company owners for the 2024 financial year was $30.6 billion, down from $32.4 billion in 2023 according to the earnings document.
Business Times
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Times
Trafigura's buyback headache grows amid fresh wave of exits
[LONDON] A fresh wave of senior executive departures is heaping pressure on Trafigura Group's commitment to buy back its employees' shares, just as a profit boom shows signs of faltering. Trafigura has deferred about 30 per cent of the buybacks that were scheduled for this year, according to sources familiar with the matter. Among current and former Trafigura traders, many of whom have the majority of their wealth tied up in the company, conversations have turned to whether the commodity trading giant will delay part of next year's planned repurchases as well, the sources said. Share buybacks are the main way that Trafigura rewards the roughly 1,400 employees that own the company, and have been a conduit for vast riches in recent years. The deferrals mean its current generation of traders face a less certain future, at the same time as some of its rivals are going on aggressive hiring sprees. The departure of a large number of longstanding top executives has piled pressure on the company because it commits to buy their shares back in instalments when they leave. The departures are also coming after a period of extraordinarily high profits, which has inflated the value of the shares due to be bought back. Already in the six months to March, Trafigura spent more money on buybacks than it made in net profit. Trafigura does have wide discretion about how much to spend on buybacks, and a source close to the company said that any decision about next year's buyback would only be made after the end of Trafigura's financial year in September. The source highlighted that the company's group equity of US$16.2 billion at the end of March was well above a self-imposed minimum of US$15 billion, and represented nearly 20 per cent of its total assets, also well above a ratio of 15 per cent that the company considers to be comfortable. Over the past two years, Trafigura's three top executives all retired from their jobs, culminating in only the second CEO transition in the trading house's history. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up The departures have continued this year with a fresh wave of senior exits, including Hadi Hallouche, head of Trafigura's downstream oil division, Julien Rolland, head of strategic projects, and Ignacio Moyano, the chief risk officer. More are leaving from the middle ranks of the trading house: former crude trading head for Asia and Europe Daniel Yuen is joining Millenium Management, while head of Asia carbon trading Rushan Pandya is leaving to join Mercuria Energy Group, according to sources familiar with the matter. At the same time, the company's profits are also under pressure. While Trafigura continues to report earnings far higher than any time before 2020, its profits have fallen from the highs of 2022 to 2023 when the market fallout from Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine helped lift earnings across the industry. When Trafigura reported half year results in June, it warned of trading headwinds. Sources familiar with the matter said that the company took a hit earlier this year in gas, where prices have tumbled since February. Meanwhile, its sprawling zinc smelting business Nyrstar remains under severe pressure from a tight market for raw materials. The company is also still trying to rebuild its reputation after a series of scandals, ranging from alleged frauds against it in nickel and Mongolia that have cost it more than US$1.5 billion, to a corruption conviction earlier this year in Switzerland. The situation has made for a challenging first few months in the job for Richard Holtum, who took over as the third chief executive officer in Trafigura's history in January. Bloomberg reported last year that he had told staff he wanted Trafigura to focus on making money, and since taking the job, he has expounded a mantra of making the company 'simpler', 'smarter' and 'sharper'. Still, the large buyback bill has not stopped Trafigura investing, with the company forming part of a consortium to buy an oil refinery in France, as well as striking large prepayment deals in copper and iron ore. The trading house also recently returned to the bond market, raising US$500 million earlier this month. 'Trafigura's key financial metrics are at historically high levels, and shareholder returns do not constrain its ability to invest and grow,' the company said in a response to questions. 'In addition, the group maintains near-record liquidity, and its trading performance remains strong.' BLOOMBERG
Reuters
24-07-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Trafigura letter to Prateek Gupta's company warned about nickel cargoes, court document says
LONDON, July 24 (Reuters) - A letter sent by Trafigura to Prateek Gupta's company warning it not to raise suspicions at financing bank Citi about nickel cargoes provides evidence that the commodity trader was aware of fraud, Gupta alleged in a court document. This is the latest twist in a long-running case in which Geneva-based Trafigura filed a lawsuit against Indian businessman Gupta in February 2023, alleging it had been the victim of a $600-million fraud involving nickel cargoes. Gupta has previously said in his defence that Trafigura staff devised the scheme at the centre of the case. The new letter appeared in an amended defence document, filed last week and released by the court, in which Gupta's lawyers sought to add weight to his case. Trafigura, a major industrial metals and oil trader, has consistently denied that its employees knew about the alleged fraud in which low-value materials such as scrap were substituted for high-grade nickel. Trafigura declined to comment on Thursday. Geneva-based Trafigura booked an impairment charge in 2023 of $590 million for losses it suffered in connection with the case, which is due to go to trial in November. Citi (C.N), opens new tab provided as much as $850 million for a complex "transit financing" operation in which cargoes of nickel would be purchased from Gupta by Trafigura, repurchased by Citi and eventually resold to Gupta's firms, the document says. The new defence document alleges that Trafigura's and Gupta's staff worked together to lengthen voyage times to extend the period of credit offered by Citi and lessen the possibility of inspections at port warehouses that would reveal the cargoes true contents. Citi declined to comment. The letter, dated January 2022, cited in the defence document, from a Trafigura employee based in Mumbai to a Gupta employee, allegedly warned that banks would not find it logical to see a transit time of 95 days for a voyage from Taiwan to mainland China that would usually take a couple of days. "Luckily Citi accepted this one, with little suspicion, but we might not get as lucky in the future," the letter said. In December 2023, Gupta failed in his attempt to get a London court to lift a global freezing order on his personal and business assets. Gupta's lawyers alleged Trafigura did not disclose important information, an argument a judge rejected. Currently, the two sides are going through a disclosure process for further documents and witness statements ahead of trial.
Bloomberg
18-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Ex-JPMorgan Metals Trader ‘Disco' Is Joining Trafigura
Daniel Amsbury, who spent years as a dominant force on the London Metal Exchange as a trader for JPMorgan Chase & Co., is set to join Trafigura Group, according to people familiar with the matter. Amsbury, known in the tight-knit world of the LME as ' Disco,' is the latest veteran of JPMorgan's metals team to take a high-profile role in the physical trading industry.
The Independent
18-07-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
I was once hit with a superinjunction and know how democracy dies in the dark
I was once smacked with a superinjunction … and lived to tell the full Kafkaesque tale. So I have a lot of sympathy for The Independent and other media organisations who, for nearly two years, have been forced to sit on a story which the British state didn't want told. My own experience of being gagged involved an unappetising company called Trafigura, which had been caught dumping toxic chemicals off West Africa in 2006. The company had shelled out more than £30m in compensation and legal costs to 30,000 inhabitants of Abidjan in Ivory Coast who claimed to have been affected by the dumping. Trafigura was keen to suppress the findings of an internal report, which could have proved embarrassing. So they obtained an injunction to stop The Guardian from publishing it – and then, for good measure, a further injunction to prevent us from revealing the existence of the original injunction. Welcome to superinjunctions, which were, for a while, sprayed around like legal confetti – often by errant footballers keen to keep their off-pitch escapades secret. The Trafigura case represented a novel application of the law to silence investigative journalism, seemingly contradicting the only dictum about the courts that most people are familiar with – the principle that the law must be seen to be done. Trafigura went one step further. When a Labour MP tabled a question about their use of a superinjunction, their lawyers, the unlovely company Carter-Ruck, even warned newspapers that they would be in contempt of court if they dared mention this parliamentary intervention. That was plainly ludicrous. Trafigura's legal pitbulls had lost sight of the fact that people risked their liberty and their lives to fight for the right to report what their elected representatives say and do. The super injunction collapsed like an undercooked souffle. And here we are 16 years later, discovering that, for 683 days, a tiny handful of lawyers, judges, politicians and civil servants had been silencing the press from telling the most extraordinary story of how a hapless MoD official caused a catastrophic data breach, putting the lives of thousands of Afghans in peril. The saga began in September 2023 when Mr Justice Knowles issued a gagging order contra mundum (against the world) forbidding anyone from revealing the leak, which named Afghans who had assisted the British forces in Kabul – and who might now be at risk of reprisals from the Taliban. The judge spoke in lukewarm terms about the importance of freedom of expression, but considered a blanket gag was essential to give MoD time to mitigate the harm. Since then, a growing number of journalists became aware of the story, and another judge, Mr Justice Chamberlain, held multiple hearings – many of them closed to outsiders – to decide how long the injunction should hold. At one point, about a year ago, he thought enough was enough, but was overruled by the Court of Appeal. It was only this week that the curtain was lifted and we were allowed to know that as many as 18,500 Afghans had secretly been flown to Britain at a cost variously estimated to be between £400m and £7bn (ie we don't know). British spies and special forces soldiers were also among the tens of thousands of people potentially put at risk by the catastrophic Afghan data leak. The clincher for Chamberlain was a risk assessment report commissioned by the current government from a retired civil servant, Paul Rimmer. Rimmer took a markedly different view of the ongoing risk and, said Chamberlain, 'fundamentally undermined' the case for the gagging order to continue. And so it was that, at midday on Tuesday, the jaw-dropping nature of what had been going on was finally revealed. Some might argue that, back in September 2023, there was a case for some kind of news blackout to give the authorities a chance to alert those most at risk, and to extricate as many people as possible. The question is, was it right to keep the gagging order in place for so long? Chamberlain clearly thought it was fine to discharge it a year ago. Was he right? Or was the MoD justified in arguing for more time? The first thing to be said is that the state (in the form of governments and Whitehall) will, in such circumstances, always argue for more secrecy. They will say they are acting in the national interest. But history tells us that the government of the day can often not be trusted in their judgment of where the national interest lies. In 1938, the government of the day attempted to use the Official Secrets Act to compel Duncan Sandys MP to disclose the source of his information about the state of anti-aircraft defences around London. Sandys later became defence minister. Historians now take a different view of those who opposed appeasement in the 1930s. Also in the 1930s, the appeasing government condemned the 'subversive' whistleblowers who were feeding Winston Churchill information about Britain's readiness for war. 'The damage done to the Services far outweighs any advantage that may accrue,' raged a now-forgotten war minister. He was wrong: Churchill and his informants were right. The government of the day tried in 1967 to prevent The Sunday Times, under its editor, Harold Evans, from publishing an accurate account of the case of former MI6 agent Kim Philby and his life as a double agent. The then foreign secretary, George Brown, having failed to prevent publication, publicly accused Evans of being a traitor and of 'giving the Russians a head start... for god's sake, stop!' It's not just a British instinct. In 2004, George W Bush talked The New York Times out of running a series of articles which revealed that the US National Security Agency [NSA] had been eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without any warrant. Bush told the editor: 'You'll have blood on your hands.' The editor spiked the articles. So Mr Justice Chamberlain was right to be a little sceptical about what the state's representatives were telling him during this two-year saga. As he pointed out, the potential sums of money involved (£7bn!?) and the sheer number of urgent migrants were entirely legitimate subjects of political debate. Even more troubling is the fact that members of parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) were also kept in the dark. In June 2024, a court of appeal judge suggested that the ISC might be allowed access to the issue. But the lead KC for the MoD poo poohed the idea. Lord Beamish, the ISC's chair, said the decision not to keep his committee in the loop was 'appalling'. He's right. The ISC is a statutory committee intended to scrutinise the work of Britain's spy agencies, including GCHQ, MI6 and MI5. Being told that the MoD doesn't trust them with 'certain pieces of information' calls into question the entire mechanism of oversight in the secret state. What else do the spooks not think they can be trusted to know? Ironically, the seven media organisations – including The Independent – that were in on the secret by the time the injunction was finally discharged all behaved impeccably in not breathing a word. It's a topsy-turvy world in which journalists can be trusted with knowing information that the ISC was denied. Lord Beamish is right to be furious – and no doubt his committee will want answers. They're not the only ones. There should be the fullest possible reckoning. As the saying goes, democracy dies in darkness.
