Oil and commodities trader Trafigura has paid out a record $3bn (£2.4bn) to its top traders after more than doubling its half-yearly profits to $5.5bn largely due to the rise of prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The company, which has been beset by a string of fraud and toxic waste dumping scandals, announced on Wednesday the staff dividend would share out a 107% jump in net profits as a result of the global turmoil.
The payout – the highest in Trafigura’s 30-year history – works out at about $2.7m for each of the top 1,100 employees in the staff-owned company.
Trafigura’s chief executive, Jeremy Weir, did not specifically mention the invasion of Ukraine in the company’s statement, but said: “The six-month period to the end of March 2023 saw our teams continue to work hard to help reconfigure supply chains after the disruptions of recent years.
“We continued to experience strong demand for our services from a global customer base that relies on us to help secure access to vital resources in an increasingly complex world. As we have highlighted in previous reports, our core business of moving commodities from where they are produced to where they are needed has become more complex but also more critical and more in demand than ever before.”
The company reported a net profit of $5.5bn in the six months to the end of March, up from $2.7bn in the same period a year earlier.
The profits would have been even higher had the company not been forced to write down $590m due to legal action related to a huge alleged nickel trading fraud.
Trafigura, which relocated its global headquarters to Singapore in 2012 to save millions in tax, is the latest in a string of energy traders to report huge profits in the wake of the Ukraine invasion.
Vitol, the world’s largest independent commodity trader, made a $15bn net profit in 2022, according to the FT. The huge profits – more than the trader’s previous six years combined – led Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, to call for the windfall tax on oil and gas companies to be extended to energy traders. “It is simply not right for companies to make enormous profits out of the misery caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” he said.
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Shell and BP have also reported a huge jump in profits from their energy trading divisions.
