A former oil trader at Vitol was sentenced Friday to four years in U.S. prison for bribing officials in Ecuador and Mexico, a punishment far below the 12-year term federal prosecutors had pushed for. Javier Aguilar, convicted of foreign bribery, foreign bribery conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy, was sentenced at Brooklyn federal court by Judge Eric Vitaliano after jurors found he orchestrated a scheme paying more than $1 million in bribes to win business for one of the world's largest energy trading companies.
According to Reuters, prosecutors from the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office argued a stiff punishment was needed to deter other traders from following the same playbook, while Aguilar's defense lawyers urged Judge Vitaliano to spare their client prison time altogether, saying Aguilar was ashamed of his conduct. The case was part of a broader Justice Department probe into commodity trading firms paying bribes to win business from state-run companies across Latin America, per the same account. Aguilar's bribes, paid between 2015 and 2020, helped Vitol obtain and retain more than $500 million worth of business with Mexican and Ecuadorean state oil companies, prosecutors said.
How the Bribes Moved Through Shell Accounts
To hide the payments, Aguilar and his co-conspirators funneled money through offshore accounts in Curaçao, Panama, and the Cayman Islands, relying on alias email accounts and code words like “shoes,” “coffee,” “medicine,” “invitations,” and “candies for the party,” according to reporting from SWI swissinfo.ch. In the Mexican side of the scheme, Aguilar paid roughly $600,000 in bribes in 2018 to two Texas-based Pemex Procurement International officials to secure contracts supplying liquid ethane to Pemex's Pajaritos terminal, according to The Maritime Executive.
On the Ecuadorian side, Aguilar sidestepped Petroecuador's rules against direct contracts with private oil trading firms by using a Middle Eastern state-owned enterprise, Oman Trading International, as a front to lock in a 30-month, $300 million fuel oil agreement for Vitol, as detailed by the Ecuador Times. A primary recipient of those Ecuadorian bribes was Petroecuador's former international trade manager Nilsen Arias, who was indicted, pleaded guilty to money laundering conspiracy, and cooperated with U.S. authorities, according to the Curaçao Chronicle.
A Rare Trial for an Individual Trader
Aguilar's decision to fight the charges at trial rather than plead guilty made him unusual within the industry crackdown. Seven of Aguilar's co-conspirators, by contrast, pleaded guilty and agreed to forfeit more than $63 million combined before his sentencing, per the Willkie Compliance Concourse.
Aguilar also pleaded guilty in a related case brought in Houston federal court, according to Reuters, and separately agreed to forfeit $7 million. He now faces deportation to Mexico regardless of his sentence, Reuters reported. Luc Cohen reported the Reuters article from New York.
Vitol's Own Reckoning and a Wider Corporate Pattern
Vitol itself has already admitted to bribing officials in Brazil, Mexico, and Ecuador, paying $164 million in December 2020 to resolve U.S. and Brazilian probes, per Reuters. Aguilar's individual sentence lands within a much larger federal crackdown: the Justice Department's long-running investigation into global commodity trading firms had produced six corporate resolutions and 20 individual convictions with more than $1.7 billion in financial penalties by March 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Other trading houses swept up in the same enforcement wave paid even steeper penalties. Swiss trader Gunvor S.A. agreed to pay about $662 million to resolve U.S. and Swiss investigations tied to Ecuadorian bribery, Reuters reported, a figure that roughly matches the more than $661 million in fines and forfeitures cited by Miller & Chevalier. Trafigura Beheer B.V. pleaded guilty in March 2024 to bribing Brazilian Petrobras officials over a decade, paying more than $126 million in fines and forfeitures, according to the Justice Department. Glencore International AG, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in May 2022 to bribery and market manipulation involving more than $100 million in illicit payments across seven countries, ultimately paying over $1.1 billion in global settlements, per the Willkie Compliance Concourse.
Prosecution Setbacks Elsewhere in the Same Probe
The broader effort to prosecute individuals connected to Pemex bribery has not been uniformly successful. Hoodline reported in April on a Houston case in which a federal judge acquitted a defendant who had been convicted of conspiring to bribe officials at Pemex. That outcome underscores the evidentiary hurdles federal prosecutors continue to face in cross-border bribery cases even as they rack up convictions and forfeitures against the traders and companies at the center of Latin America's state oil procurement networks.
