CORRUPT OIL TRADER TURNS ON COLLEAGUES IN MASSIVE AFRICA BRIBE CASE
WASHINGTON
- When Anthony Stimler left Glencore in August 2019, he had two big secrets: For a dozen years, he’d paid millions in bribes to African officials and intermediaries. And he was now helping a US Justice Department investigation into the company and numerous former colleagues.
Corruption isn’t exactly unheard of in the extraction and trading of commodities, especially in the developing world.
But details of Stimler’s cooperation deal, obtained from the US attorney’s office in Manhattan and which haven’t been reported before, 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.”
Glencore of Baar, Switzerland is one of a handful of firms that dominate global trading of oil, fuel, metals, minerals and food, middlemen who buy from producers and sell to refiners who turn the goods into finished products.
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’d been doing - and that he didn’t act alone. A lawyer for Stimler declined to comment for this article, as did Glencore. Stimler is out on bail in the UK and awaiting sentencing at a later date.