The days of handing out bribes to secure commodity contracts are over, the heads of the world’s biggest trading companies said, after a series of US bribery scandals put the sector under intense scrutiny.
Speaking at the FT Commodities Global Summit in Lausanne the heads of Vitol, Trafigura and Gunvor each said they had overhauled trading and compliance processes since the 2010s and that bribery and corruption has no place in commodity trading today.
“We’ve tried very hard over the past few years to re-engineer some of those processes and policies,” said Russell Hardy, chief executive officer of Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader.