Switzerland's highest court has convicted the commodities trading giant Trafigura and one of its senior executives of bribery over payments made by the firm to gain access to Angola's lucrative oil market. This is the first time an entire company has been charged by Switzerland's highest court, and bribery convictions of senior staff are rare. Trafigura's lawyers said the company and Wainwright intended to appeal against the verdict, so the former executive was not jailed immediately.
The case against Trafigura has had all the elements of a financial thriller: millions of dollars, shady middlemen and a chain of shell companies located in offshore havens like the Virgin Islands. Documents presented to the court by Swiss prosecutors showed payments authorised on Trafigura's own headed notepaper.
Trafigura, whose lawyers appeared bullish before the verdict, denied bribery. The company said its own compliance and anti-corruption measures had been independently assessed and found to be excellent. But the sheer weight of the evidence - which included dozens of documents, emails and memos - revealed a different picture: strict anti-corruption measures on paper but an intricate structure set up to evade those measures in reality.
At the heart of it sat a middleman named "Mr Non-Compliant" in an anonymous Geneva office. The case will send a chill through commodity brokers worldwide but especially in Geneva, where Trafigura and many other commodity trading houses are headquartered.
In an eerie coincidence, the night before the verdict was delivered, a fire broke out at the five star Hotel des Bergues - where, court documents showed, an Angolan official stayed at the expense of Trafigura in Swiss federal prosecutors hope the case will be a symbol that the old ways of doing business are finally over.
