Syrian oil deal snapped up by Trafigura on day of US boycott
A giant oil trader with Maltese shareholding is believed to have picked up a Syrian government tender for gasoline from state oil company Sytrol, on the same day US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for an international boycott of Syrian oil and gas products.
Trafigura was reported by Reuters and Euronews of having picked up the tender on 12 August from the Syrian government, which is an oil exporter but does have the refining capacity to meet its domestic needs and relies on petrol imports.
On the same day Clinton called for sanctions against Syria’s oil and gas industries as the best way of putting pressure on the regime and stop its murderous repression of protests which began on 15 March and have cost upwards of 1,700 lives.
In April this year Vitol was the first company to organise the sale of Libyan oil on behalf of its rebel movement, freighting about 1 million barrels lying idle in Singapore to US refiner Tesoro.
Trafigura has regularly featured in allegations of corruption and malpractice since its creation in 1993, being named in the Iraq Oil-for-Food Scandal, and then convicted in Amsterdam in 2010 for illegally dumping toxic waste in Ivory Coast and fined €1 million.
In November 2009, the Malta Independent on Sunday reported that a significant proportion of the toxic waste alleged to have poisoned 108,000 in the Ivory Coast in 2006 was produced offshore Malta by Trafigura on board the Probo Koala tanker in April 2006.
Internal company documents revealed that the gasoline processed at sea offshore Malta and Gibraltar on the chartered tanker, using a process known as ‘caustic washing’. The toxic residue was then dumped in the Ivory Coast by a local company, Compagnie Tommy, after Dutch authorities refused the toxic cargo’s offloading in Amsterdam. In the following weeks tens of thousands of people in the city reported a variety of symptoms, including nausea, breathing problems, vomiting and diarrhoea.
Trafigura notoriously tried to prevent reporting of a question in the UK parliament of the Ivory Coast affair in British newspaper The Guardian by using a “super-injunction” gagging order, and brought a libel suit against the BBC’s “Newsnight” programme for their reporting on the story.
In February 2011 the public prosecutor in the Netherlands opened an inquiry into allegations Trafigura paid bribes to a leading politician in Jamaica.
Trafigura is the world’s third-largest oil and metals trader after Vitol and Glencore. Although based in Amsterdam, the company has an opaque offshore network using many subsidiaries and shell companies in its international dealings.
The fiscal address is in Amsterdam, the operational centre is in London, while the headquarters are in Lucerne, Switzerland. Trafigura’s main shareholders are Jersey, Dutch Antilles, and Maltese-based companies.
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Would be interesting to know which legal office in Malta looks after them. This would be very revealing on the way this country works and how politicians have turned this country into a safe haven for international criminals and how they profit personally from it.
