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Lawyers for Trafigura have accused Switzerland’s federal prosecutor of mounting a “crusade” to try to hang a corruption conviction on the company for “political” purposes.
For the past week-and-a-half, the commodity trader and its former chief operating officer Michael Wainwright have been on trial in a blockbuster legal case for allegedly bribing an Angolan government official.
The case has offered a rare glimpse into the opaque workings of the global trade in natural resources and the politically sensitive and unstable environments in which its biggest players operate.
Prosecutors on Monday asked that Wainwright be jailed for four years and Trafigura forced to pay $156mn in fines and returned profits, for conducting a “textbook” criminal scheme.
Centred around Trafigura’s lucrative push into Angola between 2009 and 2011, the case is the first time that Switzerland has tried a commodity trader in court, despite being the industry’s main global centre of operations.
Before this month, a top executive from a commodity trader had never been put on trial for corruption anywhere in the world.
A “pact of corruption” existed at the highest levels of Trafigura, Swiss prosecutors claimed. “The tone at the top . . . was bribery at the top,” said prosecutor Héloïse Rordorf-Braun earlier in the week
Trafigura’s lead counsel Jean-François Ducrest said the public prosecutor was engaged in a “political discourse” that sought to cast “powerful multinationals . . . as the incarnation of evil”.
Earlier in the day, Wainwright’s lawyer, Daniel Kinzer, said his client had been unjustly put in the dock in order to “send a message” to the world that Switzerland was getting tough on corruption.
Wainwright stepped down as COO of Trafigura in April, after 16 years in the role that made him one of the most powerful figures in global commodities.
The former executive and Trafigura do not deny that millions were paid by an intermediary they used in Angola to an offshore company, control of which was given to a senior Angolan public official. But they said Trafigura and Wainwright were not aware of the purpose of those payments.
Wainwright “did not want to bribe anyone,” Kinzer said, rejecting the prosecutor’s accusation that his client was the “linchpin” in the bribery scheme and had tried to “camouflage” involvement by using intermediaries and secretive communication.
The case hinged on a small number of key documents because there was “a pact of concealment”, prosecutors said. But they said the evidence they were able to present, though piecemeal, constituted a “smoking gun”.
Kinzer countered that the court was “being invited to consider hypothetical evidence [by] postulations that it has been covered up”. Trafigura’s counsel argued that the prosecutor’s case relied on flimsy and unreliable testimony.
Ducrest asked why former Trafigura executive, Mariano Ferraz, known in the company as “Mr Angola”, who was alleged to be at centre of the alleged scheme, had not been called indicted or called to testify.
Ferraz was convicted in his home country of corruption in a separate case in 2018, and Trafigura claimed that he had provided damning testimony to Switzerland’s prosecutor as part of a bargain he struck with authorities in Brazil to reduce his jail time. Plea bargains are not legal in Switzerland.
“The federal prosecutor based its indictment on Ferraz’s statements,” Ducrest said. “Ferraz is the guest star,” of the case, he mocked. “But he is not only the main actor, but also the scriptwriter of the indictment. He is the one who writes the story. In his own way. In his own interest.”
In a second line of legal defence, Trafigura’s team sought to demonstrate that the company had robust compliance measures in place at the time.
Such a demonstration would provide a defence for the company, which under Swiss criminal law is only liable if it is found not to have taken reasonable steps to stop acts of corruption.
Judges in the case will now deliberate the arguments, and a judgment may take several weeks, or even months, to arrive.
