Vitol Trader Pleads Guilty for Second Time to Bribery Charges

Former Vitol energy trader Javier Aguilar has pleaded guilty to a second set of charges related to a vast bribery scheme involving officials at Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex. The scandal cost his former employer $135 million and led to more than a half-dozen guilty pleas in related cases.

The charges relate to a 2018 deal between Aguilar and two Texas-based Pemex employees, Gonzalo Guzman and Carlos Espinosa. Aguilar sought to win a tender for an ethane supply contract from Pemex and met repeatedly with Guzman and Espinosa to see if they could reach an agreement to ensure that Vitol won the tender.

According to reports at the time, the tender called for the supplier to ship refrigerated ethane to Pemex’s Pajaritos terminal, in total quantities of up to 290,000 tons per year. The supply would help Pemex increase its own production of ethane-derived chemicals. (Ethane production from Pemex’s own gas fields is declining, and the company was reactivating its Pajaritos terminal to fill the gap.)

Aguilar agreed to pay Guzman and Espinosa a total of about $600,000 if Vitol won the ethane supply contract, and he requested information about Vitol’s competitors that he could use to his advantage. In June or July 2018, Vitol won the contract, reportedly beating out Saudi competitor SABIC.

Aguilar honored his end of the deal. Guzman received $370,000 in bribes and Espinosa received $255,000. The money from Vitol’s British bank account was laundered through shell companies in Curacao and Mexico using intermediaries and then paid into the bank accounts of the two Pemex employees. In invoices submitted to Vitol, these financial transfers were disguised as swap agreements and other business services. The conspirators referred to the bribes in Spanish as “shoes,” “medicine,” “invitations,” “coffee,” “prescriptions,” and other code words.

The scheme was quickly unmasked by authorities, and by December 2020, Vitol had agreed to pay a $135 million criminal fine and enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Charges against individual conspirators followed shortly thereafter.

After a lengthy trial, Aguilar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and related charges, joining seven co-conspirators who had previously pleaded guilty. At sentencing, he faces up to 40 years in prison and a fine of more than $7 million.

This is Aguilar’s ​​second conviction this year. In February, a federal jury found him guilty of conspiring to pay more than $1 million in bribes to employees of Ecuador’s state-owned oil company Petroecuador, as well as laundering money for Pemex’s bribery scheme. He faces up to 30 years in prison on those charges. The two cases will be joined in federal court in Brooklyn for the sentencing phase.