Trafigura, one of the largest traders of raw materials and oil, once again the victim of fraud! After a gigantic nickel fraud discovered two years ago, another fraud, this time involving fuel, is said to have taken place in Mongolia. Amount mentioned: $1.1 billion.
Fraud of a few million or a few tens of millions of dollars is not surprising, or almost not at all, in the trading world. But more than a billion losses are enormous and surprising, confides an oil trader. In a press release released on October 30, Trafigura talks about « serious breaches » to qualify the facts.
The bad practices would have taken place over five years and would have been discovered at the end of 2023, according to the Bloomberg agency, following an internal control coupled with an external investigation.
In Mongolia, where the fraud took place, Trafigura is one of the main fuel suppliers. Due to local regulations, Trafigura can only deliver to the border. It is then local distributors who take care of marketing at the national level.
Trafigura sold on credit to its local partners and waited until they themselves had been paid before being reimbursed. But these local partners allegedly failed to honor their deadlines on time and accumulated a huge debt to Trafigura for five years, a debt officially discovered much later. Perhaps because it had been hidden internally? Trafigura has not detailed the mechanisms at play, the investigation is still ongoing, but we already know that several employees of the group in Ulaanbaatar have been suspended.
« Complex chain of transactions »
According to the Reuters agencythe main local partner, Lex Oil, reportedly admitted that it owed the company more than half of the $1.1 billion in damages assessed by Trafigura.
But the shortfall would also lie elsewhere: the Swiss giant says in fact that it has paid inflated invoices on the basis of false documents. A fraud on two levels in a way. Trafigura, for its part, mentions a “ complex chain of transactions with a small number of local partners “. A fraud that could cost him $1.1 billion, an amount already provisioned by the trading house.
This new scandal was made public a few weeks before the president took office. new boss of Trafigurain January. This even though, in a few days, the Swiss trader and several of its former managers are called to appear before a Swiss court for suspicions of corruption in Angola.
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