Dutch prosecutor investigating world's largest oil trader for bribery: report

The Dutch Public Prosecution Service (OM) suspects the world’s largest oil trader, Vitol, of bribery in Kazakstan, a spokesperson for the OM confirmed to Follow the Money (FTM). Due to the sensitivity of the case, the OM could not comment further. But sources told FTM that the OM thinks the Rotterdam company bribed the son-in-law of a former Kazakstan president based on a fraud investigation by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB).

Vitol is the largest company in the Netherlands in terms of turnover. Established in Rotterdam in 1966, it says on its website that it has played a central role in oil for 50 years and trades around 7 million barrels of crude oil per day.

According to FTM, the OM suspects Vitol of bribing Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of former president Nursultan Nazarbayev.

In 2018, Public Eye—a Swiss civil society organization that investigates corruption in the raw materials sector, among other things—discovered that Vitol had been doing business with Kulibayev's confidants for years via an opaque joint venture based in Rotterdam. The joint venture made a profit of 1.1 billion dollars between 2009 and 2016, and according to Public Eye, Kulibayev got a share of that profit through his business relationship with Vitol’s partners.

Kulibayev is known to have a massive influence in the Khazakstan fossil fuel sector. He served as a director of both Kazakstan’s state oil company and the sovereign wealth fund and sat on the board of the Russian Gazprom from 2011 to 2022.

Vitol rejected Public Eye’s accusations of cronyism, but the story was widely picked up by the international press, including in the Netherlands. That prompted the Amsterdam trust office JTC, which managed the affairs of a shareholder in the joint venture, to file two reports with the Financial Intelligence Unit. The reports referred to “allegations about Timur Kulbayev’s involvement in Ingma Holding bv, in which our client has a minority interest.”

In early 2019, the Dutch central bank DNB launched an investigation to see whether JTC complied with all the trust office rules. Investigators came across a series of “illogical” transactions from September 2018. The investigators found that Vitol had hired a consultant for its activities in Khazakstan and paid that consultant through the Swiss accounts of a letterbox company in Panama.

The DNB labeled the transactions as “suspicious” and possible indications of money laundering. However, because the DNB investigation focused on JTC and its client, Vitol only played a supporting role in the investigation and got off lightly. Though, the oil trader did deregister the joint venture at the end of 2021.

That investigation has now prompted the OM to investigate Vitol for bribery, according to FTM.

It is not the first such allegations against Vitol—the Rotterdam oil trader has been plagued by scandals. In 2007, for example, it pleaded guilty to corruption in Iraq. In 2020, it settled with the United States Department of Justice for bribery. The American authorities accused Vitol of paying bribes to officials in Latin America through a Curacao accountant and various intermediaries.