Ex-Trafigura chief working officer takes stand in bribery trial | USAEMALL.com

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Trafigura’s former chief operating officer said he had “to be honest . . . forgotten” about what the compliance committee on which he sat did during the three-year period Swiss prosecutors have accused the trading group of facilitating corruption in Africa. 

Mike Wainwright, chief operating officer of the company from 2008 to April this year, gave evidence on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning as the key figure in a blockbuster criminal trial that began this week in Switzerland. 

Swiss authorities have charged Trafigura Beheer BV, the natural resources trader’s former parent company, with failing to prevent acts of serious corruption, and Wainwright with bribery. Both are accused of conspiring to pay more than €5mn in bribes to a senior Angolan government official between 2009 and 2011 to secure hugely lucrative oil trading contracts. 

The trial is the first time a commodity trader has been accused of corruption in Switzerland and the first time globally that a top executive at such a company has been directly accused of criminal activity. 

Wainwright told a panel of judges at Switzerland’s federal criminal court in Bellinzona that he had “never been exposed” to any instances of corruption during his time at Trafigura.

He denied knowing that money paid out on his authority to an intermediary, Consultco, had ended up in an offshore corporate entity known as Wyland, control of which was later given to the senior Angolan official who approved contracts worth $143.7mn in profits for Trafigura, according to prosecutors.

“I don’t see why there would [have been] a risk of corruption in Consultco,” said Wainwright. “I don’t believe doing business in Angola should necessarily mean business is corrupt. In fact I believe the opposite.” 

He also sprung to the defence of Trafigura’s founder and former chief executive Claude Dauphin, who he called an “inspirational” leader and “a genius at managing people”. 

The Swiss federal prosecutor’s case — outlined in an indictment unsealed last month — puts Dauphin, who died in 2015, at the centre of the alleged bribery scheme. Dauphin’s family have reacted angrily to the allegations now being made against him, and accuse Switzerland’s federal prosecutor of scapegoating him.

“He was a good person,” Wainwright told the court. “I don’t believe he would pay [a bribe].” 

Swiss prosecutors showed the court documents taken from another senior former Trafigura employee known as “H”.

The individual, who played a key role in arranging the financial transfers between Trafigura and intermediaries doing business in Angola, said Dauphin had called him “Mr Non-Compliant”.

The individual left a position at Trafigura during the period in question to work as an arms-length financial consultant for the company. 

“Why am I Mr Non-Compliant?” he said in a self-recorded voice note cited by the prosecutor and taken from his phone. “Because I am doing something that cannot be done internally.”

A text note taken from H’s computer — a series of apparent talking points for a meeting — further noted that he had “never applied for this [external] role”.

“You said I was one of the family like Mike . . .” another bullet point notes. Another states: “You said I would be doing the company a big service to take the role.” 

Wainwright said he did not know what had led H, who he had worked with extensively, to produce the note. He speculated that H was unhappy about no longer being on the Trafigura payroll and getting a share of the company’s profits. Trafigura is a private company owned by its senior staff.

Over seven hours of examination, judges quizzed Wainwright over Trafigura’s compliance functions and the company’s once extensive use of third party “intermediaries” to facilitate business around the developing world.

The nature of such arrangements is at the centre of the prosecution’s case against the company, as it seeks to prove that Trafigura’s internal checks and balances were inadequate. 

Wainwright was a member of Trafigura’s compliance committee. When asked about its function, he told the court: “To be honest, in the period 2008 to 2011 I had forgotten about this committee.”

He also said he could not remember a single instance of the committee intervening in any compliance matter, which was the day-to-day business of the company’s compliance officer Ronnie Ballak, he said. 

Wainwright told judges that although company policy required a member of the committee to sign off on all relationships between the company and third party intermediaries, in practice it was always a member of the “commercial” side of the business who did so.

Asked about the intermediary arrangements concerning Trafigura’s business in Angola, Wainwright said: “I don’t remember the intermediary agreement in question being specifically approved by the compliance committee, but all intermediaries were approved by the commercial team and the commercial team [contained] one, two or three individuals from within the compliance committee.” 

Wainwright described a corporate environment in which senior individuals were “empowered” to sometimes stray beyond the roles defined for them on paper. 

“I don’t believe people in Trafigura are put in boxes,” he said, in reference to the fact that his own contract of employment remained unchanged for years — despite a greatly expanded roster of senior supervisory responsibilities at the company.

“I am not a big believer in job descriptions,” he said. “[Aspects] of my role would not necessarily be documented in a contract.”