Four Glencore Traders Plead Not Guilty to Bribery Charges

Four former employees of trader Glencore have pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery in connection with the firm's oil operations in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Cameroon in 2007-14.

Paul Hopkirk, 51; Martin Wakefield, 66; David Perez, 54; and Ramon Labiaga, 56, have been arraigned at a UK court and have pleaded not guilty to charges of "conspiracy to give corrupt payments" to local officials and intermediaries. Gibson, Perez and Wakefield face an additional charge of falsifying accounting documents for allegedly writing up fake cash-payment invoices for an intermediary, Nigeria's Amazoil Ltd. Two additional top trading executives, former oil trading chief Alexander Beard and oil operations director Andrew Gibson, have also been charged but have yet to enter pleas; both maintain that they are innocent.

The case will take time to make its way through the court system, and the trial is set to begin in October 2027.

Corruption allegations have plagued all of the major commodity trading houses in recent years, and Glencore is no exception. In 2022, the company pleaded guilty to American charges of international bribery and market manipulation, and it paid a combined $1.1 billion in penalties and fines.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, Glencore International and its subsidiaries bribed intermediaries and foreign officials in West African countries for more than a decade, securing favorable oil contracts in return. In Nigeria alone, prosecutors said, Glencore and its subsidiaries paid more than $52 million to local intermediaries, in the expectation that those funds would be used to pay bribes to Nigerian officials. The scheme netted the trading house hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, Justice officials said.

"At bottom, Glencore paid bribes to make money – hundreds of millions of dollars. And it did so with the approval, and even encouragement, of its top executives," said then-U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York at the time.

In addition, the company admitted that its American traders were in the practice of submitting fake bids to the Platts trading window in order to drive benchmark fuel oil prices up or down, depending on whether they were buying or selling. This technique was used in order to manipulate fuel oil prices at two American seaports. As a penalty for this scheme, Glencore agreed to pay a criminal fine of $340 million, forfeiture of $144 million, and hire an independent monitor for three years. It also settled a related case brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for a civil penalty of $865 million and disgorgement of another $320 million.

If the firm's admitted bribery offenses had been discovered later, it could have avoided prosecution in the United States. The Trump administration halted all enforcement action on Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) cases in February 2025. In an executive order, the White House said that pursuing corruption cases like the one against Switzerland-based Glencore "actively harms American economic competitiveness and, therefore, national security."