Vitol pays out US$6bil to top senior staff

LONDON: Commodity trading giant Vitol Group paid out US$5.9bil to its executives and senior staff through share buybacks last year, even as its profits more than halved to US$4.2bil.

The 2025 results are the latest example of how a small group of commodity traders continue to reap spectacular riches in the wake of a profit boom sparked by the energy crisis early this decade.

While a retreat from recent years, the profit is still higher than any year prior to 2021 and brings the company’s total profits since 2022 to US$41bil.

Vitol, the world’s largest commodity trading house by revenue, is owned by roughly 600 of its employees.

Vitol is the latest major commodity trader to have lifted payouts to its partners above annual profits, as the boom-time gains from the last energy crisis have faded.

As a result, the trading house’s equity value dropped from US$30.6bil to US$29.1bil at the end of the year.

In contrast, smaller rival Mercuria Energy Group Ltd has been retaining profits in order to grow its equity base as it embarks on an ambitious growth push in metals and liquefied natural gas.

Energy markets this year have faced a further spike in the price volatility and dislocations that commodity traders like Vitol tend to thrive on, although the initial chaos caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz also presented challenges.

Bloomberg reported in April that the company incurred mark to market losses in the early days of the Iran war, but that it also made around a US$2bil profit in the first quarter of the year. — Bloomberg