Glencore admitted to sending bribes in private jets to Nigerian officials
Global commodity trading giant, Glencore, has been fined the sum of £276.4 million by a UK Court for bribing Nigerian officials to gain favorable crude oil trading contracts.
The judgment was handed by a UK Judge, Justice Peter Fraser on Thursday afternoon, reported by Financial Times.
Glencore had admitted to sending bribes in private jets to Nigerian officials before the judgment.
Glencore committed corporate corruption: The report noted that Justice Fraser said Glencore committed corporate corruption on a widespread scale, deploying very substantial amounts of money in bribes.
He added that “Bribery is a highly corrosive offense; it quite literally corrupts people and companies and spreads like a disease; fraudulent activity was endemic” within the company’s west African oil trading desk based in London.
Glencore’s UK energy trading unit pleaded guilty to paying bribes to Nigerian and Cameroon officials from 2011 to 2016 following an investigation by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office.
Financial Times added that Glencore’s UK unit pleaded guilty to five counts of bribery concerning $26.9 million in payments to officials in Cameroon, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast, and two counts of failing to prevent bribery in relation to just under $2 million of payments to agents in Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.
The Serious Fraud Office probe revealed that Glencore had paid more than $28 million through employees and agents to secure preferential access to oil across its oil operations in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, and South Sudan.
Glencore’s UK trading arm received a £182.9 million fine on Thursday alongside a confiscation order of £93.5 million to be paid in 30 days.
Previous cases of bribe:
- It was reported in May that Global mining giant, Glencore, earned profits of $124 million after paying bribes to Nigerian officials worth $52 million between 2007 and 2018.
- This was disclosed by the US Justice Department in a Bloomberg report after the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle US, UK, and Brazilian probes.
- The court filing disclosed the company schemed to reach senior government officials in Nigeria within the period by using code words for bribes, including “newspapers” and “chocolates”.
