Trafigura Group announced that chief operating officer Mike Wainwright will leave next year, the first sign of a changing of the guard among senior executives at the trading house, who are also its major shareholders.
Wainwright, one of Trafigura’s three most powerful executives, will leave at the end of March 2024. Along with CEO Jeremy Weir and co-head of oil trading Jose Larocca, he was part of the top trio that came forward to introduce- yes the company following the death of founder Claude Dauphin in 2015.
Trafigura did not provide a reason for Wainwright’s departure, which comes as the trading house is dealing with the fallout from being the victim of an alleged nickel fraud. The company announced in February that it was facing losses of almost $600 million after finding that the nickel loads it had bought contained no nickel. He is taking legal action against Prateek Gupta, the Indian businessman he accuses of perpetrating “systematic fraud”.
Trafigura has said it does not believe any of its employees were complicit in the alleged fraud. A Gupta spokesman has said he plans a “strong response” to the allegations.
Since the saga became public, Bloomberg has previously reported the departures of Trafigura’s head of nickel and cobalt trading, a senior metals trader in Mumbai and the head of metals operations.
Wainwright, 49, joined Trafigura in 1996 as an assistant petroleum account, three years after it was founded by a group of former Marc Rich traders. Since then, the company has established itself as one of the world’s largest independent commodity trading companies, moving more than 400 million tonnes of oil, gas, metals and minerals annually.
The company and its rivals have been among the biggest beneficiaries of disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, generating massive profits after commodity prices soared last year.
As COO, Wainwright spearheaded the transformation of Trafigura’s middle office functions, the teams that manage the operational logistics of a brick-and-mortar trade, such as managing legal documentation, coverage or shipping , from trading rooms in Geneva and Singapore to cheaper hubs in cities like now. Bombay and Montevideo. He has also overseen a major investment in Trafigura’s IT systems, with the introduction in recent years of a platform called Titan.
Outside of the commercial market, Wainwright is a keen endurance driver, having competed in the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans race.
