‘An MBA in Corruption’: How Top Oil Trader Paid Bribes for Years

For years, the world’s largest oil trading firm has maintained that it has “zero tolerance” for corruption. Now Vitol Inc. has admitted that it was paying bribes through a network of shell companies and sham contracts.

As recently as July 2020, while publicly repeating those assurances, Vitol was bribing government officials in Ecuador and Mexico.

In Brazil, a Vitol executive delivered cash to traders at Petroleo Brasileiro SA in exchange for the “gold number” -- the price at which Vitol should bid to win tenders from the Brazilian state oil company.

The revelations, from a deferred prosecution agreement ...