Swiss trading and mining company Glencore has been accused of hiding its corrupt activities through misleading statements by some of the world’s biggest portfolio managers, as per the Financial Times. The claimants alleged that they suffered losses due to untrue statements and omissions made by the mining company in its 2011 prospectus for listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

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They also alleged that the company made omissions in its 2013 prospectus for its merger with Xstrata.

Nearly 200 funds are seeking compensation for damage caused by the alleged false claims made by the company. Fidelity, Vanguard, Legal & General, HSBC, Abrdn and Invesco are among the funds that are seeking compensation.

The sovereign wealth funds including GIC, Norges Bank, Mubadala, Aabar Holdings, Kuwait Investment Authority, and Oman Investment Authority are also in the list of claimants. The list also includes dozens of pension funds.

Earlier, following an investigation, Glencore admitted to bribery and market manipulation in 2022 in London’s high court, the High Court of Justice. The mining company agreed to pay $1 billion in fines in the US, 280 million pounds in the UK and $40 million in Brazil, after it pleaded guilty to a number of charges as per FT.

Glencore has been looking for big investments, including an attempt to acquire the Canadian miner, Teck Resources for $23 billion. The company has strengthened its ethics and compliance programme recently.

The claimants, who had also bought Glencore shares when it got listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2011, alleged that the prospectuses had a number of false and misleading statements.

These alleged false statements surfaced from the Swiss mining company’s failure to reveal prevalence of bribery, corruption and fraud in the business activities of its key subsidiaries.

The company’s ex-CEO Ivan Glasenberg, CFO Steven Kalmin and former board chair Tony Hayward are among those named as defendants in some of the claims filed.

A number of claims were filed in the London’s high court since October 2022, while in June, the claimants filed a joint ‘particulars of claim,’ that contained a common set of allegations covering six related cases, as per the FT report.

The ‘particulars of claim’ revolve around three instances of alleged unlawful conduct — bribery in copper and cobalt acquisitions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, bribery schemes in Glencore’s oil trading business in West Africa, South Sudan, Brazil and Venezuela, and a fuel oil price manipulation scheme in the US. The particulars of claim are nearly 200 pages long.

(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Aug 31, 2023 7:15 PM IST