Glencore ordered to pay £276m by Crown Court
The judge at Southwark Crown Court, Mr Justice Fraser, has sentenced Glencore Energy UK Ltd to pay £281m in fines, confiscated profits and costs as punishment for “sustained criminality”, making Glencore, a FTSE 100-listed company, the first ever UK corporate convicted on charges of bribing.
A UK subsidiary pleaded guilty in June to five counts of bribery and two counts of failing to prevent bribery related to its oil operations in several African countries.
The charges were brought by the Serious Fraud Office after conducting an investigation which exposed that the commodity trading giant, via its employees and agents, paid bribes of over $28m for preferential access to oil, including increased cargoes, valuable grades of oil and preferable dates of delivery. These actions were approved by the company across its oil operations in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.
Similar charges were brought by the US Department of Justice following extensive investigation into foreign bribery and commodity price manipulation schemes which resulted in a $1bn (£800m) settlement in May 2022.
In addition to the charges brought in the UK and in the US, Dutch and Swiss authorities are also investigating alleged wrongdoing, some of which are understood to be related to Glencore’s mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This case demonstrates that the corruption frequently goes hand in hand with commodity trading in poor countries with bountiful natural resources where access to local commodities is often controlled by the state. In such cases, temptation to benefit from these often proves stronger than the desire to follow elaborately drafted internal anti-bribery policies which not that uncommonly prove entirely fictional. This is specifically so where many illicit activities are conducted through the company’s own employees using company’s cash with approval of senior management, just as in the Glencore case.
FT, Reuters, SFO, The Guardian