Rogue oil trader implicates former colleagues

When Anthony Stimler left Glencore in August 2019, he had spent 12 years paying millions in bribes to African officials and intermediaries. And he began to help a US Justice Department investigation into the company and numerous former colleagues. A Fin24 analysis notes that details of Stimler’s co-operation deal offer a rare opportunity to see how it works – the scale, scope and almost routine nature of such transactions. One aspect is the role of intermediaries, often favoured by governments in the region. The so-called briefcase companies act as conduits for traders’ bribes to officials, taking a cut and directing state business back to the traders. Glencore was a dominant player in Nigeria, Chad, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea, and says it no longer uses intermediaries as part of a revamped and cleaned-up operation. ‘An issue that comes up with trader corruption is agents and intermediaries in the mix,’ said Alexandra Gillies, an adviser at the Natural Resource Governance Institute, which seeks to stamp out corruption in emerging market resources. ‘Clearly it’s the top modus operandi for how these schemes work.’

Before getting caught, Stimler spent years in the game, beginning as early as 2007.  His confession in July to foreign bribery and money laundering charges, the first ever by a Glencore trader, makes clear that he knew just what he had been doing and that he didn’t act alone. A lawyer for Stimler declined to comment, as did Glencore. Stimler is out on bail in the UK and awaiting sentencing at a later date. ‘When I made requests for payments to intermediaries, I was aware that other Glencore traders who worked with me were doing the same thing,’ Stimler told a federal judge in New York. ‘I intended that a proportion of the payment to intermediaries operating in Nigeria were to be passed on to Nigerian state-owned oil company officials. The purpose of the payment was to influence those officials’ decisions regarding the Nigerian government’s allocations of crude oil cargo.’