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Swiss authorities have ordered Glencore to pay about $152 million in fines and compensation, following a four-year investigation into the alleged bribery of a Congolese public official by a business partner in 2011.
The Swiss public prosecutor’s office has closed its criminal investigation into the UK-listed natural resources group, ordering it to pay a fine of 2 million Swiss francs ($2.4 million) and a claim for compensation of 150 million dollars in relation to the estimated financial advantage accrued by the business partner.
The resolution of the case ends the last of the publicly known investigations into historic allegations of corruption and misconduct involving Glencore that have dogged the commodities trader’s investment case for years. A parallel Dutch case was also dropped on Monday.
The corruption in question occurred in 2011, when one of Glencore’s business partners allegedly paid commissions to a Congolese government official to acquire minority stakes in two mining companies from the Central African country’s state-owned mining agency for less than their value.
Swiss authorities said in a statement that Glencore was criminally liable “for failing to take all reasonable and organizational measures necessary to prevent the corruption of a Congolese public official by its business partner.”
However, Glencore said the summary conviction order stated that Swiss authorities had not established that any of its employees had knowledge of the bribery, nor that the company had benefited financially from the conduct of the business partner.
Glencore did not accept the Swiss authorities’ findings but, to put an end to the matter, agreed not to appeal the sanctioning order.
“Glencore is pleased to have resolved these investigations relating to past matters that occurred over 13 years ago,” said Chairman Kalidas Madhavpeddi.
“This resolves the last of the previously disclosed government investigations into historical misconduct.”
Glencore is one of the world’s largest commodity traders, shipping millions of tonnes of metals, minerals and oil around the world each year. The Swiss-based group is the largest Western mining group operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s largest copper producer and the source of more than half of the world’s cobalt.
The company’s operations in the country have come under scrutiny because of its ties to Dan Gertler, an Israeli businessman who was placed on the U.S. sanctions list in 2017.
Glencore has always maintained that it did not secure its entry into the DRC mining sector through deals with Gertler, but rather that it ended up in business with him when they independently acquired interests in some of the country’s mines. Glencore subsequently purchased Gertler from those projects.
The conclusion of the Swiss and Dutch investigations comes as a series of corruption and bribery cases against Glencore and its private commodities trading competitors, such as Gunvor and Trafigura, were resolved.
Both Gunvor and Trafigura pleaded guilty to separate bribery charges by U.S. prosecutors earlier this year. Gunvor agreed to pay $660 million and Trafigura $127 million in fines and forfeited profits.
In 2022, Glencore pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bribery and market manipulation following investigations by US, UK and Brazilian authorities and paid fines totalling just over $1 billion.
Last week, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office charged billionaire former Glencore oil chief Alex Beard and four other former executives with conspiring to make illicit payments to secure lucrative oil contracts.
