A subsidiary of the multinational Glencore, owner of the Horne smelter in Rouyn-Noranda and the Raglan mine in Nunavik, among others, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to all corruption charges brought against it by the Serious Fraud Office. ) from the United Kingdom.
The UK office’s investigation found that Glencore Energy (UK) had paid more than US$28 million in bribes to gain preferential access to oil assets in Nigeria, Cameroon, Côte-d’ Ivory, in Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.
The multinational will experience its sentence at the beginning of next November.
Other investigations in progress
Last May, the multinational had already been sentenced in the United States in the same case to pay US$1.185 billion, including US$700 million for fraud and corruption and US$485 million for manipulation of the prices of various contracts traded on the markets. Another US$40 million must also go to the Brazilian authorities, for corruption.
Corruption investigations are still ongoing in the Netherlands and Switzerland in connection with Glencore’s mining operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Unprecedented profits
Glencore said in February that it had set aside a provision of $1.5 billion to settle these cases, for which it preferred to plead guilty rather than undergo the legal process.
However, the multinational will have no trouble taking the hit. Last week, it said it was on course for a record year, expecting to post a profit of US$3.2 billion in the first half of 2022, almost as much as its full-year profit of $3.7 billion. 2021.
Glencore is enjoying, like the entire commodities sector, the most profitable period in its history as the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused commodity prices to soar in the markets.
Image affected in Quebec
In Quebec, its subsidiary Glencore Canada is also in the limelight for the wrong reasons in certain cases.
This is particularly the case at the Horne smelter in Rouyn-Noranda, whose arsenic emissions reach 100 ng / m3 (nanograms per cubic meter), well beyond the acceptable threshold of 3 ng / m3 set by the Ministry of the Environment.
Radio-Canada revealed earlier this week that in July 2019, the then national director of public health, Dr. Horacio Arruda, had an annex mentioning an incidence of lung cancer removed from a report. much higher in Rouyn-Noranda than elsewhere in Quebec and citing arsenic as an aggravating factor. According to the minutes of a meeting held in the wake of the presentation of the report, Dr. Arruda had withdrawn the appendix after meeting with the management of the foundry. However, he said on Wednesday that he had nothing to reproach himself for this decision.
Glencore also owns the CCR copper refinery in Montreal East, whose emissions of 5.3 ng/m3 of arsenic had raised the concerns of the Direction de la santé publique de Montréal in 2020.
The company was also blamed this week by the Administrative Labor Tribunal for having wanted to hinder union activities and for having negotiated in bad faith at the Raglan mine. The 630 unionized workers at this copper mine located in Nunavik have been on strike since May 27.