Swiss trader Gunvor agrees management buyout after pressure over Russia links
Torbjörn Törnqvist will hand over his company to US head Gary Pedersen
Torbjörn Törnqvist, the Swedish billionaire who runs Swiss commodities trader Gunvor, will exit the company after agreeing to a management buyout led by its US head Gary Pedersen.
Törnqvist, 72, owns 86 per cent of Gunvor, which said it had an equity value of $6.6bn earlier this year.
No financial details were given by Gunvor in relation to the deal, but the company said Törnqvist would sell “the entirety of his holdings” to a group of current employees and that there would “continue to be no outside ownership or interests”.
For the past month, Gunvor has been reeling from the fallout of an audacious, and unsuccessful, attempt to buy $22bn of international assets from sanctions-hit Russian oil company Lukoil. Gunvor scrapped its bid after the US moved to block the deal.
The deal would have transformed the Swiss trader, but in the end only served to renew long-held suspicions about Törnqvist’s ties to the Kremlin. The Swede co-founded Gunvor with Gennady Timchenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was hit with sanctions in 2014.
Törnqvist bought out his partner at that point and has tried to distance Gunvor from Russia. Responding to the attempt to buy Lukoil’s business, the US Treasury described Gunvor as a “Kremlin puppet” on social media platform X.