A former Glencore director said he used to fly the world carrying a bag full of cash to secure deals for the commodity trader, evidence of the industry’s longstanding history of corruption, a problem it’s still grappling with today.
“I used to go with 500,000 pounds to London,” Paul Wyler who was one of Glencore’s most senior executives and a board director until 2002, said in an interview for The World for Sale, a book on the history of the commodity trading industry.
In those days paying so-called “commissions” was both legal and even tax-deductible for a Swiss company, Wyler ...