The world’s biggest oil traders said they’re wary of trying to muscle back into Russian exports, a response that might disappoint the US Treasury officials working to ensure no disruption to global petroleum supplies.
In late 2019 Gunvor Group, one of the world’s biggest oil traders, said it would make a clean break from the past by settling a long-running bribery case in Africa.
The world’s biggest oil traders say crude could rise above $60 a barrel in a year as demand grows and OPEC keeps cutting. Or it might fall to $45 as another wave of U.S. shale hits the market.
A former London oil and gas trader who built up a fortune in the Russian energy business has been ordered to pay his estranged wife £453 million by a divorce court judge.
Top executives at the world’s largest oil-trading houses said the worst of the market’s woes are probably over, with some predicting prices will climb to $50 a barrel by next year.
Oil traders are recording some of their best results on record, whilst the industry, and many countries, are reeling from the global downturn in the oil price.
To see how oil traders are profiting from the longest-lasting glut in three decades, look at the tiny Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Glencore Plc hired tanks at the island’s only oil terminal to stow crude, joining Vitol Group, people familiar with the matter said last week. They’re responding to the market’s deepening contango, a situation where prices today are lower than those in future months, allowing traders with access to storage to lock in a profit. From St. Lucia to South Africa to Rotterdam, they’re seizing the opportunity. “Contango opportunities are emerging,” Ian Taylor, chief executive officer of Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, said in an interview earlier this month. While the oil market has been in contango since August 2014, in the last month prices have moved in a direction that makes the trade more profitable. The price difference between a Brent oil contract for immediate delivery, the global benchmark, and one-year forward stood at minus $7.82 a barrel on Tuesday, more than double its level in mid-July.