The company paid US$26m (£23m) through agents and employees to oil company officials in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ivory Coast between 2011 and 2016.
Prosecutors said employees and agents of Glencore Energy UK used private jets to transfer money to pay the bribes.
Glencore Energy UK pleaded guilty to seven corruption offences in June.
She was ordered to pay a fine of £182.9million by Judge Peter Fraser of Southwark Crown Court, who also authorized the confiscation of £93.5million from the company.
Along with five allegations of corruption, the subsidiary admitted to allegations of failing to prevent agents from using bribes to close oil contracts in Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan. Judge Fraser said the offences to which Glencore pleaded guilty “constituted large-scale corporate corruption, involving the use of very large sums of money in bribes”.
“The corruption is long-standing and took place in five different West African countries, but originated in the defendant’s West African oil trading division in London. It was endemic among traders in that particular department,” he added.
Founded in 1974, Glencore is one of the largest multinational commodity trading and mining companies in the world.
Its subsidiaries operate in more than 35 countries, but Glencore’s London office mainly traded oil, with one of its crude oil divisions covering West Africa. Mining firm Glencore admits UK corruption allegations
The Serious Fraud Office told Southwark Crown Court on Wednesday that Glencore Energy UK paid millions of dollars in bribes to officials in five African countries or failed to prevent payment.
The bribery allegations said the company’s aim was for officers to ‘fail to carry out their duties properly or to reward them for doing so, by improperly favouring Glencore Energy UK in the allocation of oil charges oil, crude oil extraction dates and grades”. allocated to crude oil”.
In 2018, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) opened an investigation into Glencore’s compliance with US money laundering and corruption laws, which date back to 2007. It covered the mining giant’s activities in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Venezuela.
Britain’s SFO followed suit in 2019, investigating one of Glencore’s UK subsidiaries for “suspicion of corruption” in Africa. The Serious Fraud Office previously said the investigation revealed “bribery and bribery for profit”.
Clare Montgomery, Representative of Glencore, said: “The Company fully regrets the damage caused by these violations and recognizes the damage caused, both nationally and publicly, in the affected African states, as well as the damage caused to others inflicted.”.
Judge Fraser said in his remarks on the ruling that Glencore was “committed to corporate reform and appears to be a very different company today than it was at the time of these violations.”
Lisa Osofsky, director of the Serious Fraud Office, said the case marked the first time since the implementation of the Bribery Act 2010 “that a company has been convicted of actively authorizing corruption, rather than simply not preventing it.”
“For years and around the world, Glencore has been chasing profits at the expense of national governments in some of the poorest countries in the world. The company’s relentless greed and crime have rightly been exposed,” she added. In May, the company accepted a US $ 1.1 billion (£ 900 million) deal for a plan to bribe officials in seven countries over the course of a decade.
It concerned the operations of the mining giant in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Venezuela.
