A former Vitol oil trader has gone on trial in the US accused of bribing government officials in Ecuador and Mexico to win contracts of more than $500m over five years.

Prosecutors told a court in New York that Mexican Javier Aguilar made corrupt payments to secure deals from state-owned Petroecuador and Pemex. He denies the charges.

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Aguilar and his co-conspirators used a network of shell companies and intermediaries to disguise the nature of the payments, the court heard.

The group created sham consultancy agreements and used code words including “shoes”, “coffee” and “medicine” to describe the alleged bribes.

The payments led to deals including a $300m agreement for Petroecuador to supply an unidentified state-owned Middle Eastern oil and gas business with fuel oil over 30 months.

Vitol benefited from the arrangement by signing a separate deal with the Middle East company to haul the oil products, court documents allege.

Aguilar, who was based in Houston, Texas, faces at least a decade in prison if convicted of three counts of money laundering and bribery, according to reports.

The total sum of payments linked to Aguilar, which initially came from Vitol accounts, amounted to more than $1.5m for officials in Ecuador and Mexico from 2015 to 2020, according to prosecutors.

Long-running scandal

Aguilar claims that he was framed by his boss at Vitol, the court was told. His lawyers told the trial that Aguilar believed the payments were legitimate ones made to consultants working on the deals.

Aguilar was charged in 2020 but his trial has been delayed by the Covid pandemic.

The charges are the latest chapter in a long-running scandal in which Vitol Inc, the US affiliate of the world’s largest independent oil trader, agreed in 2020 to pay $135m to settle US investigations into bribery claims in Ecuador, Brazil and Mexico.

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