Trader and shipowner Vitol is being investigated by Dutch prosecutors over its previous business activities in Kazakhstan.
This is according to the country’s public prosecutor’s office, which confirmed a report by domestic news site Follow The Money (FTM).
The report claimed the probe covers alleged bribery in the country, but neither the prosecutor nor Vitol would comment on the nature or scope of the investigation.
Vitol told Reuters it had been contacted by “a Dutch authority regarding certain historic activities in Kazakhstan”. The group added it would cooperate.
It has claimed the FTM report contained inaccuracies.
The trader told TradeWinds: “We are surprised that FTM has repeated matters, originally raised by Public Eye in 2018, that were subsequently subject to successful legal action which required Public Eye to issue a statement confirming that it was incorrect to publish material that gave impression of parties being involved in corruption.”
The report linked the probe to a fine imposed by the Dutch central bank in 2021 on Dutch company JTC, which oversaw a holding entity containing Vitol companies active in central Asia.
The penalty was levied for a failure to properly disclose suspicious transactions to a consultant in Kazakhstan in 2018.
Vitol is a major player in Kazakhstan’s oil market.
It held a minority stake in the holding company that JTC oversaw but was not fined at the time, nor named in the decision.
Trader convicted
In February, TradeWinds reported a former Vitol trader faced up to 30 years in prison after being convicted in the US of paying more than $1m in bribes to secure a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Javier Aguilar, 49, was found guilty of bribing officials of Petroecuador, the Ecuadorean state-owned oil company, after an eight-week trial.
He was also convicted of laundering money used to bribe officials from Ecuador and an affiliate of Mexican state-owned oil company Pemex.
Prosecutors said Aguilar used shell companies and sham invoices for the bribery operation to obtain a 30-month contract worth $300m to Vitol to ship crude produced by Petroecuador in 2016.
Officials called it a “sophisticated bribery and money laundering scheme”.
