Vitol staff handed record $10.6bn payout
Commodity trader’s roughly 600 employee owners received average of more than $17.5mn in share buybacks last year
Vitol handed a record $10.6bn to its senior employees through share buybacks last year after a period of unrivalled growth for the world’s largest independent commodity trader.
The record payout follows $6.4bn awarded through the scheme in 2023 and far exceeds the compensation at Vitol’s rival trading houses, Trafigura, Mercuria and Gunvor.
The group, whose chief executive is based in London, is owned by an estimated 600 senior employees spread across principal trading hubs in London, Geneva, Singapore and Houston. Based on that number, each partner will have received an average of more than $17.5mn last year, although many senior executives are likely to have received much more.
The sky-high remuneration, disclosed in accounts filed in Luxembourg, follows three years of huge profits for Vitol, which significantly outperformed its closest rivals during the disruption in energy markets that followed Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Vitol made net profits of $8.7bn last year, according to the filings, after recording earnings of $13.2bn in 2023 and $15.1bn in 2022. In those three years alone, Vitol made almost double its total profits over the previous decade, according to calculations by the Financial Times.
The trading house, which will be 60 years old next year, is one of the most powerful players in global energy markets yet remains relatively little known outside the industry. Senior executives limit public appearances to a handful of industry events each year. While privately held rivals, including Trafigura, publish their accounts, Vitol does not, so the figures are only available once its Luxembourg-registered parent company files its accounts in July.
The share buyback, which was first reported by Bloomberg, was bigger than Vitol’s profit this year, meaning the group’s shareholder equity dropped to $30.7bn in 2024 from $32.5bn a year earlier. However, it is still more than double the $13.4bn in total equity it held in 2021.
Vitol has also used its profits in the past three years to acquire new assets across the energy sector, including the largest refinery in the Mediterranean, BP’s retail fuel network in Turkey and South African downstream oil company Engen. The company now owns a total of almost 10,000 petrol stations. This year it announced a $1.65bn deal to acquire part of an oil project in Côte d’Ivoire, and an LNG development in the Democratic Republic of Congo operated by Italy’s Eni.
The annual share buybacks are paid out on top of salaries and bonuses. Those payments are recorded under total personnel costs, which were $2.1bn last year, down from $2.3bn in 2023, the filings show.
The company has already begun to make further payouts this year, with $1.7bn in employee share buybacks as of June.
Vitol declined to comment.