Vitol, Trafigura, Mercuria, Gunvor: $343 billion of turnover, eight million barrels a day, forty-five billion dollars of five-year profit — and a bribery ledger in the hundreds of millions. The private partnerships that move a tenth of the world's oil, own no fields, and answer to no one.
The most powerful energy companies on earth have no gas stations, no oil fields, and no shareholders you can name.
Vitol. Trafigura. Mercuria. Gunvor. Four trading houses, clustered around Geneva, Rotterdam and Singapore, move roughly a tenth of the world's oil between them. They are privately held, employee-owned, and almost entirely opaque — and they have made some of the largest fortunes of the commodity century while paying some of the smallest tax bills.
This investigation opens the books that are barely opened: how much they move, how much they keep, what they paid in bribes, and who the partners behind the curtain are.
Start with the volumes, because they are the shock. In March 2026 Vitol reported 2025 turnover of $343 billion on 8.0 million barrels of oil and products traded per day — up from $331 billion and 7.2M bpd in 2024 (Reuters, 24 Mar 2026). Trafigura, its Geneva rival, traded 6.6M bpd in FY2025 and 8.7M bpd in the first half of FY2026 (Reuters, Dec 2025; Jun 2026). For context: Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude exporter, produced about 9.0M bpd of crude in 2024; Iraq about 4.3M bpd (OPEC Monthly Oil Market Reports, Oct/Nov 2024). A private company with a few hundred employees moves nearly as much oil as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Chart 1 · Scale
A trading house vs. OPEC
Oil moved per day, million barrels · 2024–2025 figures
The houses were built for opacity. Vitol was founded in 1966 in Rotterdam by Henk Viëtor and Jacques Detiger — a Dutch fuel trader that became a global machine. Trafigura was born in 1993 from the split of Marc Rich & Co, founded by Claude Dauphin and Eric de Turckheim. Mercuria was founded in Geneva in 2004 by Marco Dunand and Daniel Jaeggi. Gunvor was founded by Swedish trader Torbjörn Törnqvist; his co-founder Gennady Timchenko sold his stake and exited in March 2014, days before Western sanctions over Crimea named him. All four are partnerships: employee-owned, no public filings, no quarterly calls, no shareholder democracy.
The war in Ukraine made them rich beyond precedent. Dislocated markets are a trader's paradise — every sanction, every rerouted tanker, every price spike is margin. Vitol's profits: about $15 billion in 2022, about $13 billion in 2023, about $8 billion in 2024, about $4.5 billion in 2025 — a five-year total of roughly $45 billion (Reuters, 10 Jun 2026). Trafigura's FY2025: $2.67 billion profit, $2.9 billion paid out in dividends, EBITDA of about $8.2 billion — and then $4.1 billion of profit in just the first half of FY2026, on 8.7M bpd (Reuters, Dec 2025; Jun 2026). Gunvor, the smallest of the four, still did $136 billion of 2024 revenue (OilPrice, Apr 2025) before its FY2025 profit collapsed to $104 million (Reuters, Jun 2026) — a reminder that the good years are cyclical and the houses know it.
Chart 2 · The harvest
Vitol's five-year profit run: ~$45 billion
Annual net profit, $ billions · Reuters, 10 June 2026
Where did the money go? To the partners. Vitol is owned by roughly 450 to 500 employee-partners, and the house buys back shares from departing partners relentlessly: $10.6 billion in 2024 alone, more than $31 billion since 2014 (Bloomberg via OilPrice, Aug 2025). Every buyback concentrates the remaining partners' claims on the next windfall. Trafigura paid $2.9 billion in dividends in FY2025 — more than its $2.67 billion profit, a distribution ratio the public markets would call reckless and the partners call Tuesday. There is no outside shareholder to object. There never is.
Opacity has a cost, and the US Department of Justice has been itemizing it. Vitol paid $164 million in December 2020 under a deferred prosecution agreement for bribing officials in Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador. Gunvor paid $662 million in March 2024 — to the DOJ and Swiss authorities — for a decade of bribes to Ecuadorean officials. Trafigura pleaded guilty in March 2024 and paid $126 million for bribing Brazilian officials. And in September 2026, Javier Aguilar — a former Vitol oil trader — was sentenced to four years in a US prison for the Ecuador and Mexico bribery schemes (Reuters, 18 Sept 2026). The houses' defense, in each case, is the same: rogue individuals, remediated compliance, the past is the past. The DOJ keeps finding new pasts.
Chart 3 · The cost of doing business
Bribes, fines and frauds: the shadow ledger
$ millions · DOJ, Swiss authorities, court filings
The frauds cut the other way too — the traders are victims of the opacity they inhabit. In February 2023 Trafigura disclosed it had been defrauded of $577 million in a nickel-trading scam: cargoes that turned out not to contain nickel (Bloomberg Law, Feb 2023). In December 2025 Reuters reported a $1.2 billion Mongolian fuel-supply fraud probe in which Trafigura booked losses. When your business is moving physical commodities through jurisdictions where paperwork is negotiable, the line between counterparty and con artist is a matter of diligence — and diligence sometimes fails at the billion-dollar scale.
The sharpest single figure in this investigation comes from Bloomberg's January 2026 reporting on Mercuria: about $1.3 billion of 2025 profit, and about $1 million of tax — an effective rate of 0.08% (Bloomberg via BOE Report, 16 Jan 2026). The mechanism is the oldest in the book: book the trading profits in low-tax jurisdictions, keep the physical operations where the oil is. Geneva, Singapore, Dubai — the houses are headquartered where the tax code is a welcome mat. It is legal. It is also, at 0.08%, a number that ends arguments.
The heads of the table: Vitol's chief executive Russell Hardy, who runs the $343-billion machine from Rotterdam and London. Trafigura's leadership under its executive committee in Geneva. Mercuria's Marco Dunand and Daniel Jaeggi, the founders still at the helm. Gunvor's Torbjörn Törnqvist, the Swede who built the house and bought out his sanctioned co-founder. Four partnerships, a few hundred partners, roughly a tenth of the world's oil — and a collective public profile so low that most of their own countries' citizens have never heard of them.
They own no oil fields. They move more oil than the countries that do.
The consensus ledger below is the Bureau's hater-proofing. Everything printed above survived it; the disagreements are printed too.
The Bureau's rule: every figure carries its source, and where sources disagree, both are printed.
The houses disclose little; every figure above comes from a disclosure, a filing, or a court. Where the houses declined to comment, the record speaks.
