By Emma Farge
GENEVA (Reuters) -Swiss prosecutors are seeking a total of over $156 million in penalties and compensation from Trafigura and a four-year jail sentence for former Chief Operating Officer Mike Wainwright at an ongoing corruption trial in Switzerland, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office said on Monday.
The case is the first time the country’s highest criminal court will rule on a company’s liability for the alleged bribing of a foreign official and a rare instance of a former top executive of a trading firm going in the dock and facing prison.
Swiss prosecutors say that Trafigura and three other defendants paid bribes of more than $5 million via a network of intermediaries to an Angolan official to win oil deals from 2009-2011. During hearings, the judges quizzed a current director and reviewed internal Trafigura documents and messages.
The payment sought by prosecutors includes the maximum penalty possible for bribery under Swiss law of 5 million francs ($5.7 million) as well as a compensation fee, or disgorgement, of $151 million, the Attorney General’s spokesperson said. The fee is equal to the estimated profits Trafigura made from the allegedly corrupt scheme, plus interest.
The penalty, if confirmed, will be a fraction of Trafigura’s earnings. Trafigura made net profits of $7 billion in 2022 and $7.4 billion in 2023 as an energy price rally after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and returning demand after the pandemic helped global commodity trading houses bring in record earnings.
Trafigura is defending itself in court and has said that the anti-bribery and anti-corruption controls and the compliance programme in place at the time at its parent company met legal requirements and good practice standards. Wainwright’s lawyers have said he rejects all the allegations against him and is confident the case will be dismissed.
The defendants will make closing arguments this week.
Prosecutors also sought a three-year sentence for a former Trafigura employee who is also a defendant in the case, of which half must be served. They asked for 54 months for the former Angolan official who allegedly received the bribes.
The lawyers for those two defendants deny the charges against their clients. Reuters did not name them because Swiss privacy rules place restrictions on naming defendants.
The penalty requests compare with a maximum sentence of five years in prison. A verdict is expected sometime next year and any sentence can be appealed to the Bellinzona court. Any prison sentence would be on hold pending the appeal outcome.
($1 = 0.8781 Swiss francs)
(Reporting by Emma Farge. Editing by Kirsti Knolle and Mark Potter)
