Glencore ordered to pay £281m in Africa oil bribery case

Glencore Energy UK pleaded guilty to seven corruption offences in June. It was ordered to pay a fine of £182.9m by Judge Peter Fraser at Southwark Crown Court, who also approved £93.5m to be confiscated from the company along with £4.6m in costs. The total must be paid within 30 days.

The court heard how Glencore paid $26m (£23m) through agents and employees to officials of crude oil firms in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ivory Coast between 2011 and 2016.

According to the Serious Fraud Office, two Glencore employees transported $800,000 in cash by private jet to South Sudan in August 2011, purportedly to pay for a new office but was in fact used as bribe money.

Prosecutors said Glencore Energy UK employees and agents used private jets to transfer cash to pay the bribes. Along with five charges of bribery, the subsidiary admitted charges of failing to prevent agents from using bribes to secure oil contracts in Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.

Judge Fraser said the offences Glencore had pleaded guilty to represented "corporate corruption on a widespread scale, deploying very substantial sums of money in bribes".

"The corruption is of extended duration, and took place across five separate countries in West Africa, but had its origins in the West Africa oil trading desk of the defendant in London. It was endemic amongst traders on that particular desk," he added.

Glencore, founded in 1974, is one of the largest multinational commodity trading and mining companies in the world. It operates in more than 35 countries, but Glencore's London office primarily dealt in oil, with one of its crude oil divisions responsible for West Africa.

Glencore’s chair Kalidas Madhavpeddi said the company’s conduct had been “inexcusable” and it had taken “significant action” to implement an ethics programme.

In 2018, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) launched an investigation into Glencore's compliance with US money-laundering and corruption laws dating back as far as 2007. It concerned the mining giant's operations in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela.

In May, the firm agreed to a $1.1bn (£900m) settlement in the US over a scheme to bribe officials in seven countries during the course of a decade, including Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela.

Glencore said it continued to cooperate with a previously disclosed and ongoing investigation by the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland into Glencore International AG for failure to have the organisational measures in place to prevent alleged corruption, and an investigation of similar scope by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com