The story
Trafigura Beheer BV was established as a private group of companies in 1993 by six founding partners: Claude Dauphin, Eric de Turckheim, Graham Sharp, Antonio Cometti, Daniel Posen, and Mark Crandall.
Initially focused on three regional markets – South America (oil and minerals), Eastern Europe (metals), and Africa (oil) – Trafigura has since diversified and expanded globally. In 1999, Trafigura Beheer BV, a unit based in the Netherlands, became the first company to obtain a contract to sell Sudan's oil internationally.
In November 2013, it was announced that the Tory peer and former leader of the House of Lords, Lord Strathclyde, would be joining Trafigura as a non‑executive director. He had previously stood down from the board of the group’s hedge fund arm following the 2009 controversy over the Côte d'Ivoire incident.
Executive chairman Claude Dauphin, the last remaining founder in an executive position, owned less than 20 per cent of the group’s equity at his death in September 2015, while more than 700 senior managers controlled the rest. Dauphin was succeeded by Jeremy Weir, who, in 2025, will assume the role of Group Chairman, while Richard Holtum will take the helm as CEO from January 2025, according to the company's succession plan. Holtum, a ten‑year veteran of the firm and its global head of gas, power, and renewables, will join Trafigura's board of directors in October 2024.
As of 2015, Trafigura operated in 65 offices across 36 countries. In 2023, revenue was $244.3 billion, net income was $7.4 billion, assets were $90.5 billion, and equity was $16.5 billion. In 2024, the company had around 12,000 employees operating in 150 countries, with 50 offices, and is wholly owned by approximately 1,400 of its employees.
In February 2023, Trafigura reported $577 million in losses from fraudulent shipments it had purchased that were supposed to contain nickel but instead contained much lower‑value materials such as carbon steel. The firm was alerted to possible fraud when cargoes it had purchased, purportedly containing nickel, began taking longer than expected to reach their destinations and were making more port calls than anticipated, while sellers delayed providing documentation. In December 2022, Trafigura investigators inspected purported nickel shipments in Rotterdam and discovered the fraud. The group's head of nickel and cobalt trading, Socrates Economou, left the company, but Trafigura stated that it did not believe anyone at the company was complicit in the fraud. The firm initiated legal action against the sellers involved. In January 2026, the London High Court ruled that "Trafigura was the victim of fraud on a grand scale devised and implemented by Prateek Gupta using the Corporate Defendants", and awarded Trafigura $500 million in relief plus substantial damages. The judge also ruled that the former Trafigura employees who had been embroiled in the case, Sokratis Oikonomou and Harshdeep Bhatia, were "wholly innocent of any wrongdoing". In February 2026, the London High Court increased the damages Gupta must pay to Trafigura to $700 million, plus legal costs.
In October 2024, the company reported that individuals in its Mongolian petroleum products supply business had, over a five‑year period, concealed overdue debts and manipulated data, resulting in inflated sums being paid by Trafigura. Local regulations require international fuel supplier deliveries to stop at the border, necessitating local operatives for deliveries to the domestic market. The company recorded a writedown of $1.1 billion resulting from the misconduct by staff in its Mongolian office. Banks asked Trafigura to include an explanation of events in Mongolia and its remediation plan in the presentation for its European revolving credit facility to be launched in early 2025. Trafigura said it discovered the problems in Mongolia through the compliance overhaul and tighter risk controls it had implemented as a result of the nickel fraud of which it had been the victim in 2023.
Investments
In 2003, the group established its fund management subsidiary, Galena Asset Management. In 2010, Trafigura bought 8% of Norilsk Nickel.
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In 2007, an explosion in Sløvåg in Gulen Municipality, Sogn og Fjordane county, Norway in a tank owned by the company Vest Tank had severe environmental and health consequences for people living nearby. According to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, Vest Tank was trying to neutralize chemical waste when the explosion occurred, and the owner of the waste was Trafigura, on whose behalf Vest Tank was working. Trafigura was not accused of direct responsibility, and refused requests by the Norwegian police to interview employees.
In February 2013, Trafigura invested $800 million in the Australian energy market, acquiring more than 250 petrol stations, two oil import terminals and five fuel depots in three separate acquisitions by its subsidiary Puma Energy. At the time, there was interest in Australia among energy traders due to a combination of rising demand and the closure of outdated, high-cost refineries. The same month, Trafigura joint venture DT Group partnered with Angola’s state oil firm Sonangol to form a new company, Sonaci DT Pte Ltd, to market Angola’s new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
In March 2013, Trafigura announced a deal with South Sudan to export Dar Blend crude oil from Port Sudan. The agreement with South Sudan was a continuation of Trafigura's longtime presence in the Sudanese oil market and followed the resolution of a legal dispute between Sudan and South Sudan over transit fees and oil revenues.
In October 2013 Trafigura secured USD 1.5 billion in financing for an upfront loan to Russian oil producer OAO Rosneft. The prepayment facility, which provided a loan for advance payment for more than 10 million tons of products over five years, was the largest such deal ever completed by Trafigura. A month later Trafigura signed an agreement with Dallas-based pipeline operator Energy Transfer Partners to transport crude oil and condensate via a partially converted 82-mile pipeline from the Eagle Ford oil field in McMullen County, Texas, to Trafigura’s deep-water terminal at Corpus Christi Bay, near the Gulf of Mexico.
In February 2014, Trafigura signed an agreement to acquire a 30% equity stake in the Jinchuan Group's newly established 400,000 tonnes-per-year copper smelter in Fangchengang, China. In July, Trafigura launched Lykos, an online platform in India to sell metals to small and medium-sized manufacturers in the country. In September, Trafigura completed the $860 million sale of an 80% stake in a Corpus Christi Texas oil storage terminal to Buckeye Partners LP.
In June 2015, Trafigura announced a 50:50 joint venture with Abu Dhabi investment company Mubadala Development Company—to invest in base metal mining. As part of the agreement Mubadala also acquired 50% of Trafigura's Minas de Aguas Teñidas (Matsa) mining operation, which owns three mines in southern Spain that produce copper, zinc and lead concentrate ores. This followed a doubling of processing capacity at the company's MATSA mining operation in Andalusia, Spain, where two new satellite mines are also being developed.
In August 2015, it was reported that Trafigura subsidiary Impala Terminals is investing USD1 billion in Colombia to develop a new inland road, rail and river network connecting major coastal ports with Colombia's industrial heartland. The Magdalena River, which runs between Barrancabermeja inland and Barranquilla on the Atlantic coast, will allow transportation of crude oil and petroleum products, dry bulk, containerised and general cargo to and from inland Colombia.
In October 2016, it was announced that Trafigura and Russian investment group United Capital Partners would each take a 24 per cent stake in Essar Oil, which owns India’s second-biggest private refinery in the western state of Gujarat as well as a network of 2,700 filling stations. Trafigura was criticised in December 2022 for handing out "more than $1.7bn (£1.4bn) to its top traders and shareholders after the energy crisis, fuelled by the war in Ukraine".
In 2022, the Lobito Atlantic Railway (LAR), a joint venture between Trafigura, Mota-Engil of Portugal, and independent Belgian rail operator Vecturis, secured a 30-year concession to operate the Lobito rail corridor, which runs across Angola to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). To mark the transfer of the concession, a ceremony was held on 4 July 2023 in Lobito, with Presidents João Lourenço of Angola, Félix Tshisekedi of the DRC, and Hakainde Hichilema of Zambia in attendance. The concession encompassed the 1,300-kilometre Benguela railway corridor in Angola, extending it 400 kilometres into the DRC, and any potential service extensions in Zambia. The three countries signed an agreement to accelerate growth in domestic and cross-border trade along the corridor. The new company committed to upgrading infrastructure and services, investing US$455,000,000 in Angola and up to US$100,000,000 in the DRC.
The Lobito Corridor project is considered a G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI) flagship investment in Africa. LAR’s mineral terminal at the Port of Lobito launched the venture's port operations in Angola with the docking of the MV Lindsaylou on July 12, 2024, with sulphur on board to be transferred to LAR cargo trains for shipment to the DRC for use in refined copper production in the Katanga region.
On January 11, 2023, the company sold its 24.5% stake in the Indian company Nayara Energy, which was a joint venture with Rosneft. The share was bought by Hara Capital Sarl, a subsidiary of Mareterra Group Holding. In May 2024, it was announced that Trafigura was investing in the company Greenergy.
Bond issuances and reported earnings
In 2008, the company had equity of more than $2 billion and a turnover of $73 billion that generated $440 million of profit. In March 2010, Trafigura made its first venture into capital markets, issuing Euro 400m ($539m) in five-year Eurobonds. The following month Trafigura listed its first perpetual subordinated bond on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) at a fixed rate of 7.625%. The issuance raised $500m in long-term capital that is treated as equity by international accounting rules, leaving existing shareholders undiluted. By 2011, its revenue had increased to $121.5 billion and its profits to $1.11 billion, with profits falling 11% in 2012. In 2013, as a consequence of the Singapore listing, Trafigura released financial statements for the first time, reporting Q1 profits of $216.1 million – up 3.2 per cent on the previous year. Revenue grew 7.9 per cent to USD 31.2 billion. In March 2016, Trafigura closed a 46 million yen ($413 million) three-year loan, doubling the size of its 2014 Samurai loan.
From Wikipedia’s article on Trafigura, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5