Former Vitol energy trader Javier Aguilar has pleaded guilty to a second set of charges related to a sprawling bribery scheme involving officials at Mexican state oil company Pemex. The scandal cost his former employer $135 million and has netted more than half a dozen guilty pleas in related cases.
The charges center on a deal that Aguilar brokered in 2018 with two Pemex employees based in Texas, Gonzalo Guzman and Carlos Espinosa. Aguilar sought to win an ethane supply contract tender from Pemex, and he met multiple times with Guzman and Espinosa to see if they could come to an arrangement to ensure that Vitol won the tender.
According to reports at the time, the contract tender called for the supplier to ship refrigerated ethane to Pemex's Pajaritos terminal, in quantities totaling up to 290,000 tonnes a year. The supply would help Pemex boost its own production of ethane-derived chemicals. (Ethane output from Pemex's own gas fields has been in decline, and the company was reactivating its Pajaritos terminal to make up the gap.)
Aguilar agreed to make payments to Guzman and Espinosa totaling about $600,000 if Vitol won the ethane supply contract, and he requested information about Vitol's competitors that he could use to his advantage. In June or July 2018, Vitol won the contract, reportedly edging out Saudi competitor SABIC.
Aguilar made good on his end of the deal. Guzman received $370,000 in bribe payments, and Espinosa received $255,000. Money from Vitol's UK bank account was laundered through shell companies in Curacao and Mexico using intermediaries, then paid out to the bank accounts of the two Pemex employees. On invoices submitted to Vitol, these financial transfers were disguised as swap agreements and other trading services. The conspirators referred to the bribes in Spanish as “shoes,” “medicine,” “invitations,” “coffee,” “prescriptions” and other code words.
The scheme was quickly caught by the authorities, and by December 2020, Vitol had agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $135 million and enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Charges against individual conspirators followed shortly after.
After an extended trial, Aguilar pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and related charges, joining seven co-conspirators who previously pleaded guilty. At sentencing, he faces a maximum of up to 40 years in prison and a fine of more than $7 million.
It is Aguilar's second conviction this year. In February, a federal jury found him guilty of conspiring to pay more than $1 million in bribes to employees of Ecuadorian state oil company Petroecuador, as well as laundering money for the Pemex bribery scheme. He faces a maximum of up to 30 years in prison on these earlier charges. The two cases will be consolidated in a Brooklyn federal court for the sentencing phase.
