How the Top Oil Trader’s Brazen Corruption Was Caught on Tape (2024)

To an outside observer it looked like any other business lunch. Three middle-aged men in shirtsleeves were chatting casually in Spanish over plates of guacamole, chicharrón and enchiladas.

But the subject of this conversation, in a bustling restaurant in the Marriott Marquis hotel in Houston, was anything but ordinary: the three men were discussing how to keep the money flowing for a massive international bribery scheme.

It was early March 2020 and Javier Aguilar, a boyish 46-year-old in a striped shirt, was trying to explain why there had been a holdup in the flow of cash for payoffs.

His employer Vitol Group, the world’s largest oil trader, was growing cautious because of a series of criminal investigations scrutinizing their industry, he said. The networks of offshore companies they’d been using to funnel bribe payments would need to be shut down and replaced.

“All this is getting more complicated,” said one of his lunch companions.

“Not impossible. Just more complicated,” Aguilar replied. He laughed as he recounted a story from the 1970s, when narcos could fly into Switzerland on private jets full of cash.

“It could be unloaded, nobody asked or said anything,” he said. “Así se hacía güey” — that’s how it was done, dude.

What Aguilar did not realize was that his every word was being monitored by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The two men he was eating with — Ecuadorian brothers Antonio and Enrique Peré — were secretly cooperating with the US government, and Enrique had filmed the entire encounter on a device hidden in his watch.

Four years later, the Peré brothers would be the star witnesses testifying against Aguilar in a landmark trial that has shone an unprecedented light on corruption in the commodity trading industry.

It’s a world that has been known for backhanders and brown envelopes since the days of Marc Rich, the infamous godfather of the industry. But the Aguilar trial brought to life the inner workings of a modern-day bribery scheme in more detail than ever before, with testimony from corrupt government officials, spreadsheets showing how the money was divvied up, and more than a dozen secretly recorded tapes.

On Feb. 23, Aguilar was found guilty on three bribery and money-laundering charges after just six hours of deliberation by a jury. The crimes carry a maximum sentence of 30 years, making him one of the first commodity traders ever to face meaningful prison time for corruption. (Aguilar’s lawyers, who argued that he was an unwitting participant in a scheme masterminded by others, have said he will appeal the verdict.)

But the revelations of the trial stretched far beyond Javier Aguilar and Vitol, as witness after witness described a frenzied period of corruption in Ecuador that extended across the oil trading industry. On the very first day, a former Ecuadorian official stated flatly that he had been bribed not just by Vitol, but also by Trafigura Group and Gunvor Group — together, three of the four largest independent oil traders. (The other member of the quartet, Glencore Plc, has not been accused of wrongdoing in Ecuador but in 2022 pleaded guilty to separate charges of corruption in eight other countries.)

The testimony painted a picture of an industry which has continued to write its own rules even as its largest companies have become so crucial to energy security that governments from Germany to Saudi Arabia are helping to finance them. The traders operate with little regulation or oversight, and yet Vitol alone is a behemoth of global commerce, with sales of $505 billion in 2022 that made it the fifth-largest company in the world by revenue — behind only Walmart Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Saudi Aramco and China’s state grid.

On the losing side was Ecuador, fed on by commodity traders and corrupt officials who siphoned off hundreds of millions and possibly billions of dollars from a country where a quarter of the population lives in poverty.

At one point Antonio Peré was asked if he had ever helped a client with government business without paying a bribe to a government official. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “I cannot recall one.”

Javier Aguilar did not look like a criminal mastermind.

Short, pudgy, with a shock of black hair, the Mexican chemical engineer had been a relatively junior trader at Vitol in London when, aged about 40, he was offered a role that could make his career: a move to Houston, one of the main hubs of the global energy industry, where he was tasked with finding and signing new oil trading deals to grow the company’s business in Latin America.

Vitol’s US headquarters was a temple to making money. A few years after Aguilar arrived, a giant artwork was installed on a balcony overlooking the trading floor that featured dozens of oversized banknotes — dollars, euros, pounds, pesos. It was called Cash Flow.

At that point in time, the mid-2010s, the premier playground for any oil trader looking for action in Latin America was Ecuador.

The country is a mid-sized oil producer, pumping about 500,000 barrels a day. But under the presidency of left-wing firebrand Rafael Correa it was desperate for cash.

In the commodity trading industry, oil and desperation are a famously profitable combination, and the capitalist traders had no qualms about propping up a socialist government. Correa had vowed to cut middlemen out of Ecuador’s oil sales, but Trafigura, Gunvor and others found a way around the policy — Ecuador’s state oil company Petroecuador could award contracts without the usual tender process, as long as the company on the other side of the deal was also state owned.

A former Petroecuador official described in court how Trafigura and Gunvor began using national oil companies from China, Thailand and Uruguay as fronts to steer favorable oil contracts their way, earning hundreds of millions of dollars of profits in the process.

Vitol was growing frustrated. As the industry’s biggest company, its sprawling business handles enough oil every day to supply Germany, France, Italy and Spain combined. But in Ecuador it found itself on the sidelines while rivals snapped up lucrative deals.

Aguilar set out to change that. And the man he turned to, one day in mid-2015, was Antonio Peré. Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s lively port city, Peré had worked for the Ecuadorian government before becoming a consultant and settling in Miami.

By the time he met Aguilar, Peré and his brother Enrique had set themselves up as a one-stop shop for oil traders looking to do business in Ecuador. In practice, they were a clearinghouse for bribes to Ecuadorian government officials.

Antonio, then 50, was gregarious with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a self-deprecating wit (his FBI codename was Leonardo — “like Leonardo DiCaprio, but fat and old,” he told the court) and handled the brothers’ key relationships with officials and traders. Enrique, bald, stocky and taciturn, took care of the bookkeeping, meticulously calculating who was owed what.

The Perés knew where to direct the bribes. Nilsen Arias, the head of international trading at Petroecuador, would later testify that he received bribes via the brothers to select Vitol for the deal, negotiate the terms and finalize the contract.

And the Perés knew exactly how to use a state-owned company as a front to get a good deal because they had already helped Trafigura and Gunvor do just that.

Could Vitol suggest a state firm that could be used as a front in a deal with Ecuador, Antonio asked? Aguilar had the answer: the trading unit of Oman’s state oil company, which Vitol had helped to set up.

And so one day in December 2016, the presidential plane of Ecuador touched down in Dubai. The minister of finance and the chief executive officer of Petroecuador had arrived to sign a contract to sell 17.1 million barrels of fuel oil to Oman, in exchange for an upfront payment (effectively a loan) of $300 million.

A photo taken to commemorate the occasion shows the Ecuadorian officials in a conference room together with the CEO of Oman Trading International.

There was no one from Vitol in the photo. But, according to the testimony in court, it was Vitol that would supply the $300 million, Vitol that would take delivery of the fuel oil, and Vitol that would see the profits.

The entire contract had been stage-managed by Javier Aguilar and Antonio Peré.

There’s no suggestion that Oman Trading International, its executives or its employees were involved in any wrongdoing. In response to requests for comment, a spokesperson said: “OQ Trading (formerly Oman Trading International) has at all times acted in accordance with applicable law (including the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) regarding the Petroecuador contract. OQT was neither a party to this legal case nor involved in any illegal activity.”

Ever since the nationalizations of the oil industries in the Middle East and South America in the 1970s, the trade in energy has been lubricated by bribes and kickbacks. Poorly paid government officials with the power to award contracts worth billions of dollars were easily tempted, and commodity traders were often all too happy to supply the temptation.

Marc Rich, the founder of the company that is today Glencore, was candid about it. “The bribes were paid in order to be able to do the business,” he told his biographer, Daniel Ammann, in response to reports that he had paid off government officials in Iran and Nigeria to win oil deals.

Foreign bribery was eventually outlawed even in countries like Switzerland that had for many years looked the other way, and today’s companies have sought to distance themselves from the industry’s tainted past. When asked by journalists, Vitol would repeat that it had a “zero tolerance policy in respect of bribery and corruption.”

But the trial of Javier Aguilar showed how modern-day traders had simply updated Marc Rich’s approach for the 21st Century. By adding more intermediary layers between corrupt traders and corrupt government officials, the industry has fueled a thriving underbelly of “consultants” and “brokers” with bank accounts in opaque offshore jurisdictions.

“In our country, in that area, it was common knowledge that in order to do business with the government, most of the time you had to pay bribes,” Antonio Peré said.

While Aguilar and the Perés jetted between Houston, Miami and cities in Ecuador, their money was handled from a one-room office on the sleepy Caribbean island of Curacao by a man named Lionel Hanst.

Hanst, now 62, was far removed from the high-flying world of Aguilar and the Perés. When he wasn’t around, they would joke about his naivety, his high blood pressure and his drinking. “He is just merely a tool, dude,” Aguilar told Antonio Peré in a phone call recorded by the US government.

Curacao born and raised, Hanst, had previously worked for other international oil traders including Addax and Mercuria. Now, from a room he rented from his brother (who has not been implicated in these matters) Hanst set up shell companies that would redistribute Vitol’s money to more than a dozen other intermediaries.

From Curacao, the money was sent to the Perés who would use it to pay Ecuadorian officials. To give the flow of money a veneer of respectability, Vitol signed fake brokerage contracts with Hanst’s companies and Hanst issued fake invoices.

Aguilar later described to the Peré brothers how he had been introduced to Hanst by a Vitol colleague who had previously worked with him at Addax. (That colleague, Marc Ducrest, has been described by US prosecutors as a co-conspirator in the scheme but hasn’t been charged with any crime. Ducrest has declined to comment on the case.)

“The person on an island,” Aguilar recalled. “It all sounded to me like, like very ... very James Bond, right?”

If the subterfuge gave Aguilar any pause, he didn’t show it. In fact, he appeared to relish the drama, setting up two email accounts to communicate with Hanst and the Perés with pseudonyms that referenced James Bond’s “007” codename: “perezmarcos007@gmail.com” and “sixtotomas007@gmail.com.”

The men communicated in code and referred to each other by nicknames. Aguilar, originally Mexican but based in Texas, was “TexMex.” Antonio Peré was “Tuco.” Enrique, thought to look like Bruce Willis, was “Bruce.” Arias was “El Gordo” – the fat one.

Sometimes their pseudo-spycraft veered towards the absurd: they referred to Switzerland as the “country of cheese.” Rather than naming Vitol’s competitors Trafigura and Glencore, they talked of “the T and the G.”

But the money was no joke. Hanst took a cut of 5% of all the cash that flowed through his shell companies. Aguilar himself received kickbacks from Hanst to his personal accounts that totalled more than $600,000. That was small change compared to the value of his shares in Vitol, a partnership owned by a few hundred employees, which swelled to more than $75 million by 2020.

It was not just Ecuadorian officials that Vitol bribed via Hanst. He sent money to another middleman who handed it over, sometimes in a Houston parking lot, to employees of Mexico’s state oil company Pemex, who messaged each other excitedly about deliveries of “candies.” A Venezuelan intermediary paid bribes on Vitol’s behalf to a top official at Citgo, the US refinery group owned by Venezuela’s state oil company, according to the US case against Hanst.

And it was not just Vitol that was bribing Ecuadorian officials. When Nilsen Arias, the Petroecuador trading manager, was asked in court to name other companies he took bribes from, he rattled off a list that read like a who’s who of the global oil trading industry: Trafigura, Petredec, Sargeant Marine, Gunvor and Noble Americas.

Gunvor and Sargeant Marine have admitted to bribery charges in Ecuador. A Trafigura spokesperson said the company was "not a party" to the case against Aguilar, declining to comment further. Noble declined to comment, while Petredec didn't respond to requests for comment.

Arias himself received a total of $13.5 million in bribes from various traders. That included an 18-carat gold Patek Philippe watch, which was a bribe from Gunvor, while Vitol’s money paid a 120,000 euro interior designer’s bill for his house in Portugal, the cost of installing new marble floors and redecorating its four bathrooms.

He and Antonio Peré also named Ecuadorian officials who had taken bribes including the deputy finance minister and the chief of staff of the president. (The two men were both charged as part of a series of anti-corruption cases in Ecuador in recent years.)

But it was the Perés who made the fattest margins. Of the roughly $100 million they admitted receiving from oil traders seeking business in Ecuador, the brothers kept about half for themselves.

It’s hard to quantify exactly how much the government of Ecuador lost as a result, but the profits generated by the traders add up to many hundreds of millions. An investigation by the Ecuadorian parliament in 2022 estimated that one set of Petroecuador oil deals had cost the country $4.8 billion.

By 2019 the men were basking in their success. Antonio Peré had bought himself a 65-foot yacht; Arias had splashed out on a $165,000 Porsche.

The fuel oil contract between Petroecuador and Oman was ending, but Antonio was confident they would be able to renew it.

“We are still very far away,” Aguilar cautioned in a WhatsApp message in July 2019.

“But we are going to reach the goal,” Antonio replied.

That would turn out to be hubris. Even as he typed those words, the FBI was closing in. Soon, the entire bribe scheme would come crashing down.

In August 2019, agents raided Antonio Peré’s offices in the affluent Miami suburb of Coral Gables. What they found laid bare the Perés’ role at the heart of a vast web of corrupt oil traders and Ecuadorian officials: a trove of notes and documents, including spreadsheets detailing how bribe payments on behalf of different commodity traders would be divvied up.

Enrique Peré panicked, flying to Spain. But within weeks both Peré brothers had agreed to cooperate with the US government. And so the FBI began to listen to the Perés’ phone calls. The brothers recorded numerous conversations with Aguilar, as well as Arias — who by then had left his role at Petroecuador — and three traders at Gunvor.

Through the first half of 2020, the net began to tighten. A separate investigation into corruption in Brazil had targeted several large commodity houses, including Vitol, Trafigura and Glencore, and traders were getting nervous.

“Be very careful about doing, even sitting down to talk business, anything you do… Do it outside, for God’s sake!” Arias implored in a January 2020 phone call that was, ironically, recorded by the Perés.

Aguilar himself was becoming increasingly preoccupied with how to avoid scrutiny. On one call with Antonio, he explained he’d started carrying a second, personal phone to skirt Vitol’s compliance checks.

“Internally, they become more schizophrenic, dude,” Aguilar said. “Some people have strongly recommended us to try not to use… say the computer or the office phone, for certain things.”

Within Vitol, tensions were rising. The company was dragging its feet on making the agreed payments, and Aguilar was fielding regular requests from Antonio Peré and others.

In March, the situation still hadn’t been resolved, and Aguilar met the Perés for lunch in Houston. What he didn’t know was that two FBI agents were waiting nearby as Enrique secretly filmed the encounter. Vitol didn’t think government investigators had any evidence against it, Aguilar said, but was shutting down all its existing structures as a precaution. After that, money would be paid from a new structure, he said.

On July 10, 2020, Javier Aguilar touched down in Houston at 8 a.m., stepping off an early morning flight from Mexico City into an airport that was still nearly deserted thanks to the pandemic. As he headed through customs towards the exit, a man stepped towards him with a badge.

“My name is Paul Zukas with the FBI,” the man said, ushering Aguilar into a windowless room. He was shown a photograph of his lunch meeting in Houston with the Peré brothers. Later that day, a warrant was filed for his arrest.

As it turned out, the US government did have plentiful evidence against Vitol. In December 2020, the company signed a deferred prosecution agreement, paying $164 million after admitting that it had bribed officials in Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil over a period of 15 years. In response to a request for comment for this story, the company referred back to a statement made at the time by CEO Russell Hardy that Vitol "is committed to upholding the law and does not tolerate corruption or illegal business practices."

The Perés, Hanst and Arias all pleaded guilty, as did Gunvor, which this month agreed to pay $662 million to resolve US and Swiss charges of bribery in Ecuador. “Gunvor made mistakes at the time, for which we are sorry and that we have worked diligently to fix,” Chairman Torbjörn Törnqvist said in a statement.

Aguilar himself, now 50 years old, faces up to 30 years in prison, though the sentence is likely to be significantly less than that maximum. He is also due to stand trial in a separate case in Houston on charges of bribery in Mexico.

Should his appeal fail, he’ll be the first commodity trader in a generation to go to prison for corruption. But he may not be the last. Former traders at Glencore and Gunvor have already pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing, while there are separate cases and investigations in the UK and Switzerland targeting former senior executives at Glencore and Trafigura.

It’s too early to say whether the cases will fundamentally change anything about the way the commodity traders function, or the level of corruption in oil-rich countries like Ecuador.

Adrià Budry Carbó, an investigator at Swiss NGO Public Eye who has written extensively about the trading industry, points out that four of the five giant oil traders based in Switzerland have been involved in current or very recent corruption cases. “This is a very strong signal that there is something wrong with this industry,” he says.

The wiretapped conversations between Aguilar and the Perés suggested that bribery schemes were part of the standard operating procedure for Vitol. On various occasions Aguilar referred to other “vehicles” elsewhere that were akin to Hanst’s companies. “Let me see if there is a ‘Lionel’ over there with whom I could put you in touch,” he offered the Perés at one point.

The money for Hanst was wired from a Vitol bank account in London, by staff in Vitol’s office in Geneva. Such transfers — which bypassed the company’s normal systems — could only happen with the approval of Vitol’s accounts team.

Vitol and the other traders have reacted by overhauling their internal procedures, hiring large teams of compliance officers and opening hotlines for whistleblowers. Glencore has spent the past year with two Department of Justice-appointed lawyers assessing the effectiveness of its anti-corruption program. At Vitol, it’s no longer possible to make payments outside the company’s compliance system, no matter how senior you are.

Several large traders, including Trafigura and Gunvor, say they’ve ended the use of third-party agents to win business — that is, consultants like the Perés whose official role is to score deals in challenging parts of the world, but who represent a high risk of corruption.

Vitol, however, still uses agents, an executive testified in court. (A Vitol spokesperson said that "on occasion and within the proper framework, the use of intermediaries may be appropriate.")

And in unguarded moments, traders from across the industry still tell stories of government officials finding ways to ask for backhanders. Yet the deals somehow still get done.

The US is declaring victory. “We’ve transformed the energy trading industry,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri said in a speech earlier this month. But others are not convinced.

“When the first allegations arrived they all claimed they had done nothing wrong; when there was an investigation going on they said they couldn’t comment; and then when it is over they say the allegations are old and the company has changed,” says Budry Carbó. “The only thing that is changing is the level of sophistication of the schemes.”