(Bloomberg) -- The family of the late founder of commodity trading giant Trafigura Group is protesting a landmark bribery trial in Switzerland in which he is set to feature extensively.
Claude Dauphin’s widow and children on Thursday published a joint statement arguing that the Swiss case risked becoming a posthumous trial of the trader, who led the company from its beginnings in 1993 until his death in 2015.
They said they had “requested access to the investigation file” but had been denied, and were concerned that no one would be able to represent Dauphin’s interests in court. “Are we not witnessing a denial of justice against Claude Dauphin?” they said.
On Monday, Swiss prosecutors released a 150-page indictment in the case against Trafigura and its former chief operating officer Mike Wainwright, in which they alleged that Dauphin had been a central participant in a scheme to bribe an Angolan official between 2009 and 2011. Wainwright and Trafigura, which is charged through its Dutch parent company Trafigura Beheer BV, deny the charges against them.
Dauphin was a totemic figure in Trafigura and the wider trading industry. When he died in 2015, Trafigura praised him as an “inspirational mentor” whose influence in shaping the company was “impossible to overstate.”
Dauphin was famously press-shy — Trafigura’s obituary described him as “allergic to personal publicity of any kind” — and until this year his family had also eschewed the public eye in the decade since he died.
Still, it’s not the first time that the Dauphin family has hit out at a perception that he was being scapegoated for wrongdoing that involved others.
Earlier this year, when Trafigura pleaded guilty to US corruption charges in March, it admitted as “true and correct” a statement of facts that included the claim that Dauphin approved bribe payments for oil deals in Brazil.
Dauphin’s family responded angrily, with his son telling Bloomberg that Trafigura was using him as a “scapegoat.”
In the statement on Thursday, the Dauphin family cited a recent news headline that described the case as turning into a “posthumous trial” of Claude Dauphin, “while we, the bearers of his memory and his name, are being unanimously denied access to the investigation file by all the parties, including Trafigura.”
They said they planned to ask the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona, where the trial opens on Dec. 2, for a full list of who will be testifying “so that the witnesses who incriminate Claude Dauphin alone can finally be heard publicly.”
A message left with the court for comment was not immediately returned after office hours.
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