The Swiss indictment accuses Trafigura Beheer BV, the former parent company of Trafigura Group, of failing to prevent acts of serious corruption between 2009 and 2011. It also accuses Trafigura’s former chief operating officer, Mike Wainwright, who retired earlier this year, of bribery. The Swiss federal prosecutor announced the charges against Wainwright and Trafigura Beheer BV last year, but details were withheld until now, as is customary in Swiss legal proceedings.
Dauphin, who died of cancer in 2015, was for decades one of the most powerful figures in the global trade in raw materials. The indictment marks the first time he has been named by prosecutors as having masterminded the alleged scheme. While numerous cases of bribery, corruption and money laundering have been brought by enforcement authorities against major commodity trading firms in countries across the world in recent years, none have so far directly implicated those at the very top of such organisations.
The 150-page indictment, a copy of which was unsealed on Monday and obtained by the Financial Times , alleges that some of Trafigura’s most senior executives were intimately involved in a criminal conspiracy to win lucrative government contracts in Angola by corrupting a public official between 2009 and 2011. The trial is set to open on December 2 in Switzerland’s central criminal court in Bellinzona. The indictment said that €4.
3 million was paid into bank accounts in Geneva opened in the name of th.
