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Trafigura lost a last-minute legal gamble on Tuesday to secure rebuttal evidence from a star witness in a Swiss corruption trial.
The trial against the natural resources trader, whose former parent company Trafigura Bejia BV and chief operating officer Michael Wainwright are accused of bribery, began on Monday at the Swiss Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona.
This is the first time a commodity trading company has been put on trial for corruption in Switzerland, and the first time globally that the head of a commodity trading company has been directly accused of criminal activity.
Swiss judges declared that the trial should proceed as scheduled over the next two weeks and that evidence from the prosecution’s main witness, former Trafigura executive Mariano Marcondes Ferraz, should be heard “on the merits”. .
Mr. Ferraz is a former genius trader at the company who ran the Angolan subsidiary of Trafigura, the person at the center of the bribery scandal, but in 2018 he was separately convicted of bribing Petrobras executives and imprisoned in Brazil. has been done.
Prosecutors alleged that TBBV and Wainwright worked with Ferraz to pay Angolan officials more than €5 million between 2009 and 2011 to secure the country’s lucrative oil shipping rights.
On Monday, after several hours of dense procedural arguments, Trafigura’s lawyers argued that Feras’ testimony was inadmissible because of what they called a secret plea agreement.
It presented emails between Brazilian and Swiss authorities and said it had uncovered “sophisticated (and) disguised” dealings over how Ferras’ testimony could be used.
Plea bargaining is illegal under Swiss law.
Trafigura’s lawyers also said some of Ferras’ testimony cannot be used because it contains unprovable accusations against Claude Dauphin, the company’s founder and former chief executive, who died in 2015. he claimed.
They cited a Swiss Court of Appeals ruling handed down last week that said Dauphin could not use testimony accusing him of masterminding the bribery scheme because he could not contest it. I insisted that I couldn’t.
In the Court of Appeal decision they referred to, the judges on November 28 overturned a money laundering conviction against Credit Suisse. The case comes as questions have been raised after the bank was accused of laundering Bulgarian cocaine money and the banker at the center of the case died last year. Questions important to defending the conviction could no longer be answered.
The presiding judge in the Trafigura trial denied the claim, saying, “Claude Dauphin’s death does not impede the litigation,” and pointed out the differences with the Credit Suisse case.
He said there was also too little evidence to support the idea that an illegal plea bargain took place.
“Assessment of the reliability of Feras’ statements will be made on their merits,” he declared.
Nevertheless, he and his fellow judges accepted Trafigura’s argument that there was a legitimate case to try certain charges in a time-limited manner.
Under Swiss law, serious bribery charges are time-barred after 15 years.
The prosecution’s case against Trafigura centers on payments of approximately 5 million euros made between April 2009 and October 2011 to Paulo Gouveia Jr., a former executive at Angola’s state oil company.
The payments are said to have helped Trafigura secure oil shipping rights that were highly profitable.
Prosecutors argue that “unity of action” means that payments over the entire period should be considered. The judges suggested the issue was unresolved and needed to be addressed in the final judgment.
