Glencore plc is a Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company with headquarters in Baar, Switzerland. Glencore's oil and gas head office is in London and its registered office is in Saint Helier, Jersey. The current company was created through a merger of Glencore with Xstrata on 2 May 2013. , it ranked tenth in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world's largest companies. In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Glencore International was ranked as the 484th-largest public company in the world. As of July 2022, it is the world's largest commodity trader.
As Glencore International, the company was already one of the world's largest integrated producers and marketers of commodities. It was the largest company in Switzerland as well as the world's largest commodities trading company, with a 2010 global market share of 60% in internationally tradable zinc, 50% in internationally tradable copper, 9% in the internationally tradable grain market and 3% in the internationally tradable oil market.
Glencore has a number of production facilities all around the world and supplied metals, minerals, crude oil, oil products, coal, natural gas and agricultural products to international customers in the automotive, power generation, steel production and food processing industries. The company was formed in 1994 by a management buyout of Marc Rich + Co AG (itself founded in 1974). It was listed on the London Stock Exchange in May 2011 and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It had a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but it has withdrawn from January 2018. Glencore's shares started trading on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in November 2013. The Qatar Investment Authority is its biggest shareholder as of 2016. In March 2022, Qatar's Sovereign Wealth Fund announced it would sell a stake worth £812 million (US$1.1 billion) in Glencore Plc.
History
1974–1994: formation and sale
The company was founded in 1974 as Marc Rich & Co. AG by commodity traders Marc Rich and Pincus Green. In 1993, a number of Marc Rich employees, led by Claude Dauphin, left to set up another trading company, Trafigura. In 1994, after failing to take control of the zinc market and losing $172 million, Rich was forced to sell his majority share in the company to Glencore International, the commodities trading and industrial company. Glencore's name is an abbreviation of "Global Energy Commodity Resources".
2005: dealings with "rogue states" The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National reported in 2005 that Glencore "has been accused of illegal dealings with rogue states: apartheid South Africa, USSR, Iran, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein", and has a "history of busting UN embargoes to profit from corrupt or despotic regimes". Specifically, the CIA found that Glencore had paid $3,222,780 in illegal kickbacks to obtain oil in the course of the UN oil-for-food programme for Iraq. The company denied these charges, according to the CIA report quoted by ABC.
2005–2011: Glencore, Dan Gertler, and the Congo
In 2005, proceeds from an oil sale to Glencore were seized as fraudulent gains as part of an investigation into corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In 2007, Nikanor was merged into Katanga in a transaction valued at US$3.3 billion.
In May 2011, the company launched an IPO which valued the business at US$61 billion and created five new billionaires. Trading was limited to institutional investors for the first week and private investors were not allowed to buy shares until 24 May 2011.
2011: financial and accounting manipulations
In 2011, five non-government organisations filed a complaint to the OECD against a subsidiary of Glencore over allegations that a mine it owns in Zambia may not be paying enough tax on its profits. This complaint was due to alleged financial and accounting manipulations that had been supposedly performed by the two companies' subsidiary, Mopani Copper Mines Plc (MCM), to evade taxation in Zambia. A draft Grant Thornton report alleged that tax avoidance by Glencore in Zambia cost the Zambian Government hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. The avoidance was allegedly facilitated through transfer pricing and inflated costs at Glencore's Mopani Copper Mine, which is controlled through the British Virgin Islands, a recognised tax haven. Glencore and its own auditor, Deloitte, rejected these allegations. As of 2013, Glencore's payments to Zambia's government had increased.