(Bloomberg) -- Commodity trading behemoth Trafigura Group has admitted that its founder and former Chief Executive Officer Claude Dauphin approved bribe payments for oil deals in Brazil, the first time one of the industry’s bosses has been implicated in a sweeping series of US corruption cases.

Trafigura last week became the latest of the world’s largest commodity traders to admit to paying bribes to win business, when it pleaded guilty in a Miami court. The details of Dauphin’s involvement were contained in a statement of facts in the plea agreement with the US government that the company admitted was “true and correct.”

Dauphin, who led Trafigura from its foundation in 1993 until his death in 2015, was a totemic figure in the company and the wider trading industry. “It is impossible to overstate the influence of Claude’s character in shaping every aspect of Trafigura,” according to an obituary the company published on his death.

The statement of facts referred to the conduct of several unnamed Trafigura executives in the period 2003 to 2014, when the company paid approximately $19.7 million in “corrupt commissions” to win deals with Brazil’s state oil company Petrobras.

One of them, identified as “Trafigura Executive 1,” is described as a French citizen who was “a high-level executive at Trafigura who exercised substantial control over Trafigura and its subsidiaries and affiliated entities until in or around 2015.”

Another, identified as “Trafigura Executive 2,” is described as a Brazilian citizen who “was an agent or executive of Trafigura and several of its subsidiaries and affiliated entities.”

Emails quoted in the US statement of facts in anonymized form, that were separately disclosed in full in an earlier Brazilian civil case, make clear that Trafigura Executive 1 is Dauphin and Trafigura Executive 2 is Mariano Ferraz, a former Trafigura management board member and senior executive who was found guilty on related corruption charges in Brazil in 2018.

Trafigura declined to comment, as did a spokesperson for the US Department of Justice.

In a statement that followed its guilty plea last week, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Weir said: “These historical incidents do not reflect Trafigura’s values nor the conduct we expect from every employee. They are particularly disappointing given our sustained efforts over many years to embed a culture of responsible conduct at Trafigura.”

According to the US statement of facts, Trafigura Executives 1 and 2 (Dauphin and Ferraz) caused Trafigura to enter into an intermediary agreement under which the company would pay commissions to an individual identified as “Co-Conspirator 2.”

The two Trafigura executives “knew and intended that a portion of those commissions would be paid as bribes to foreign officials,” the statement of facts says. Within a few weeks, Trafigura paid approximately $500,000 to the individual identified as Co-Conspirator 2.

Dauphin, a protege of Marc Rich, was the driving force behind Trafigura’s growth from scrappy outsider to one of the world’s largest commodity traders. Outside the industry, he was best known for having spent five months in an Ivory Coast jail in 2006 and 2007 over a dispute involving the dumping of hazardous waste in Abidjan.

But within Trafigura he was a beloved mentor who hired many of the company’s current top management. “To many employees, he became an inspirational mentor, even a father figure,” according to the company obituary. “His name will be remembered with gratitude for decades to come.”

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