Gunvor’s $661 Million Reckoning with Justice

How a Global Energy Giant Orchestrated a Decade of Deceit in Ecuador

Every barrel of oil pumped from Ecuador’s soil holds a promise. It’s a promise of funding for schools, for hospitals, for roads, for a better future. That promise belongs to the people of Ecuador. But for nearly a decade, that promise was hijacked, sold off in a backroom deal orchestrated by a global energy trading behemoth.

This here be the story of a nation’s trust being methodically dismantled, one corrupt payment at a time. It’s about how a Swiss company named Gunvor S.A. saw a country’s resources not as a public good, but as a prize to be won through a calculated campaign of bribery and deceit.

A Shortcut Paved with Dirty Money

So, how did this tomfoolery occur?

Gunvor, a powerful player in the global energy market, wanted access to the lucrative oil contracts controlled by Ecuador’s state-owned oil company, Petroecuador. But going through the front door meant competitive bidding, a process that is, at least on paper, fair.

Gunvor wasn’t interested in fair. It was interested in a sure thing.

They found their sure thing in a loophole. Petroecuador had a special program for oil-backed loans with other state-owned entities, which conveniently side-stepped the whole competitive bidding mess. Gunvor’s plan was simple and cynical: they would “partner” with these state-owned entities, effectively using them as a Trojan horse to get inside Petroecuador’s gates.

But even a Trojan horse needs someone to open the gate. That’s where the bribes came in. Gunvor enlisted two brothers, Antonio and Enrique Pere, as their “consultants”. Their real job was to act as bagmen. Over the course of eight years, Gunvor funneled more than $97 million to the Pere brothers through shell companies with sterile names like “Energy Intelligence & Consulting Corp.” and “Oil Intelligence Corp.”. It was a river of cash, disguised as “volume fees” and “success fees,” designed for one purpose: to corrupt officials from the inside out.

The Ripple Effect of a Poisoned System

The money worked. Millions of dollars landed in the pockets of key Ecuadorian officials, from a senior manager at Petroecuador named Nilsen Arias all the way up to high-level figures in the country’s energy ministries. In exchange for cash—and in one case, a lavish $38,000 Patek Philippe watch—these officials handed Gunvor the keys to the kingdom.

They directed massive oil contracts to Gunvor’s partners and fed the company a steady stream of confidential inside information that gave it an insurmountable—and illegal—advantage.

While a handful of officials got rich, Gunvor and its affiliates raked in over $384 million in profits from the scheme. That’s $384 million that could have built schools, paved roads, or funded public health initiatives. It is the materialized cost of corruption, a fortune siphoned directly from the future of 18 million Ecuadorian citizens. The scheme actively broke the public trust, reinforcing the toxic idea that the system is rigged for the powerful and connected.

A Playbook of Plausible Deniability

This was a deliberate / calculated corporate strategy, complete with a playbook for avoiding accountability. Communications were routed through personal email accounts and messages on WhatsApp. Co-conspirators were referred to by aliases.

Most tellingly, senior Gunvor managers cultivated an atmosphere of willful blindness. One manager told the Pere brothers he “did not want to know” about the payments being made to officials. Another, on a video call, instructed them to avoid speaking about bribery altogether.

This is the sound of a late stage capitalistic system designed to protect those at the top. It’s a corporate culture where executives can profit from corruption while maintaining a thin veneer of deniability, a strategy that treats massive international bribery as someone else’s messy little secret.

The Price of Doing Business

The scheme finally unraveled, leading to the court document that lays it all bare. Gunvor was charged. The company now faces forfeiture of the proceeds it gained from its crimes. But will that be enough?

When a corporation earns hundreds of millions of dollars from a crime, a financial penalty can feel less like justice and more like a business expense. It’s a line item in an annual report, a speeding ticket for a getaway car. The individual managers who directed the scheme from their offices in Switzerland and the Bahamas remain shielded behind titles like “Gunvor Manager #1” and “Gunvor Manager #2” in the court filing. The architects of the crime remain largely anonymous, protected by the corporate structure they used to enable it.

This is the frustrating reality of modern corporate justice. The corporate entity pays a fine, but the human decision-makers who drove the corruption often walk away unscathed, ready to do it all again.

What Real Justice Looks Like

Preventing the next Gunvor requires cutting up the playbook that they’ve used. It means demanding radical transparency in a global financial system that allows shell companies like EIC and OIC to operate in the shadows. It means holding individual executives criminally liable, making them personally feel the consequences of the decisions they make.

This resolution sends a strong message to international businesses about the consequences of engaging in corrupt practices. I mean, this is the second foreign corruption story about Ecuador that I’ve written a blurb about this week….

Ultimately, it means shifting power. It’s about creating a world where a nation’s natural resources are truly the property of its people, not a commodity to be auctioned off to the highest briber. The promise in a barrel of oil is real. It’s time we built a system that’s strong enough to protect it.

A Timeline of Corruption

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Information, Criminal Docket No. 24-85 (ENV), filed March 1, 2024.

There’s also a press release about the story here: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/commodities-trading-company-will-pay-over-661m-resolve-foreign-bribery-case