(Bloomberg) -- A consultant dubbed “Mr. Non Compliant,” because he allegedly controlled the flow of bribes at the heart of Trafigura’s trial, believed he was “one of the family,” according to a document shared with the court.
Describing how he was persuaded to take on a role he initially refused, the man wrote in a memo ahead of a meeting with Trafigura founder Claude Dauphin that “you said I would be doing the company a big service to take the role” and would later be able to return as an employee.
“Why am I Mr. Non-Compliant?” he said in an audio file cited by the Swiss Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona. “Because I am doing something that cannot be done internally.”
The man, who Bloomberg is referring to as H., is not among the defendants. He was a Trafigura employee for a decade before leaving the company in 2007 and setting up a consulting business in Geneva whose only clients were the trading house, its agents and intermediaries.
The evidence shines a light on how Trafigura used companies set up by former employees as intermediaries around the world — including, as alleged in the Swiss case, to bribe an Angolan official between 2009 and 2011. In 2019, Trafigura, one of the world’s largest commodity traders, said it would no longer use third parties for business development.
His remarks emerged on Wednesday, the second day of testimony from Mike Wainwright, Trafigura Group’s ex-chief operating officer who’s on trial in Switzerland accused of corruption. Wainwright denies the charges.
Asked for his reaction to H.’s remarks, Wainwright said that they appeared to be notes he was making ahead of a meeting with Dauphin and likely reflected his frustration that his lucrative shareholding in Trafigura was ending.
Trafigura rewards its top employees, who own the company, through share buybacks. When employees leave, the trader buys them out, usually over several years.
The behavior of commodity traders has been in the crosshairs of global prosecutors for several years, but this week marks the first time that senior leadership of a major commodity trading house stands trial for bribery and corruption.
Wainwright said he did not believe that Dauphin had coined the “Mr. Non-Compliant” nickname, as prosecutors allege.
A lawyer for the Dauphin family said it had protested prosecutors’ use of the nickname, as the only attribution for it appeared to come from H.’s own documents.
On Tuesday, Wainwright defended the trading house’s late founder, saying he didn’t believe that Dauphin would have paid the alleged bribes to an Angolan official in return for $150 million in oil contracts. Dauphin, a totemic figure in the commodity trading industry, died in 2015. He has featured extensively in two major corruption cases against Trafigura this year, prompting a rare public row about his legacy.
Read more Trafigura’s Ex-COO Defends ‘Inspirational’ Founder at Bribe Case
The ex-COO is charged alongside Trafigura’s Dutch parent company and two other individuals. Wainwright was asked about a Yahoo messenger chat exchange in which he approved two urgent $500,000 payments to the consulting firm through which the alleged bribes were funneled.
Wainwright testified that he had no recollection of the discussion and didn’t know what the money, described in the chat as a “loan,” was for. Wainwright said he could only assume that he had been told that the payment “was important and needed to be made.”
While Wainwright was part of Trafigura’s compliance committee, the former COO said that he “had forgotten about” it during the period in question and that he could not remember the committee intervening in any incident.
But he clarified that that would have been the role of the Trafigura’s compliance department rather than the committee, which was made up of a handful of senior executives, including himself and Dauphin.
(Updates with more detail from Wainwright testimony in final two paragraphs)
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