Ex-Vitol oil trader sentenced to four years in $500 million Ecuador-Mexico bribery scheme

A federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced a former oil trader at commodities giant Vitol to four years in prison Monday for bribing government officials in Ecuador and Mexico to win fuel contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, closing out one of the highest-profile foreign bribery prosecutions brought by the Justice Department in recent years.

Javier Aguilar, 52, a Mexican national living in Houston, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Eric Vitaliano in the Eastern District of New York, along with $7.13 million in forfeiture and a $100,000 fine, according to the Justice Department's announcement of the sentencing. Prosecutors had sought a 12-year sentence.

What happened

Aguilar worked as an energy trader at Vitol Inc. from 2015 to 2020. According to the Justice Department's case file on the prosecution, he paid more than $1 million in bribes to officials at Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, routing the payments through a Middle Eastern intermediary to get around rules barring the company from dealing directly with private firms, in order to win a $300 million fuel-oil supply contract. He separately paid roughly $600,000 to officials at PEMEX Procurement International, a subsidiary of Mexico's state oil company, to secure an ethane-gas supply contract also worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Prosecutors said Aguilar and his co-conspirators concealed the scheme using fake contracts, sham invoices and shell companies registered in Curaçao, Panama and the Cayman Islands, communicating over alias email accounts and using code words including "shoes," "medicine," "invitations" and "coffee" to refer to bribe payments. A jury convicted Aguilar in February 2024 on charges of conspiring to violate and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and conspiring to launder money in connection with the Ecuador scheme; he separately pleaded guilty later that year to a related FCPA conspiracy and Travel Act charge over the Mexico scheme.

The numbers

Seven co-conspirators, including three foreign officials in Ecuador and Mexico, have previously pleaded guilty in connection with the same bribery network and collectively forfeited more than $63 million, according to Justice Department records on the case. Vitol Inc. itself paid $135 million in December 2020 under a deferred-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Brazilian authorities, after admitting to bribery across Ecuador, Mexico and Brazil — making Aguilar's sentencing the resolution of one of the last remaining individual prosecutions tied to that broader scheme.

"This sentence makes clear that corrupt actors, like Javier Aguilar, who facilitated and led two major international bribery and money laundering schemes will be brought to justice and punished accordingly," a Justice Department Criminal Division official said in the announcement.

How we got here

The case originated from a Justice Department push, dating back nearly a decade, to root out bribery in global commodity trading, an industry the department has flagged as particularly vulnerable to corruption because trading firms often deal directly with state-owned oil companies in countries with weak anti-corruption enforcement. U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. for the Eastern District of New York, whose office prosecuted the case, said the sentencing reflects "our office's long-standing commitment to rooting out corruption in the commodities markets." FBI Assistant Director Heith Janke said the case demonstrates "the broad reach of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act," the 1977 law that bars U.S. companies and individuals from bribing foreign officials.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, enacted in 1977 after a wave of corporate bribery scandals involving U.S. companies operating abroad, bars American companies and individuals — as well as foreign nationals acting within U.S. jurisdiction, as prosecutors argued Aguilar was through his dealings with U.S.-based Vitol — from paying bribes to foreign government officials to obtain or retain business. Commodity trading has become one of the Justice Department's most active enforcement areas under the statute in the past decade, following a series of cases against major trading houses, because state-owned oil companies in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere present frequent opportunities for corrupt intermediaries to extract payments in exchange for contract awards.

Who is affected

Vitol, one of the world's largest independent energy trading firms, handling several million barrels of oil a day globally, has already resolved its own corporate liability through the 2020 settlement, but the case underscores continued legal exposure for individual traders even after a company itself has settled with prosecutors. Petroecuador and PEMEX, the two state oil companies at the center of the scheme, were the direct victims of the bribery in the sense that their procurement processes were corrupted, though neither company has faced U.S. charges. Compliance departments at commodity-trading firms are likely to study the case closely, both for the specific concealment techniques prosecutors described — shell companies, alias emails and coded language for bribe payments — and for the relatively lenient sentence Aguilar ultimately received relative to the government's request, which some compliance officers may read as narrowing the practical deterrent effect of an FCPA conviction even after a lengthy trial.

What happens next

Aguilar retains the right to appeal both his February 2024 trial conviction and Monday's sentence. Legal analysts who track Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement have noted that the four-year sentence, a third of what prosecutors sought, may factor into how the Justice Department calibrates its requests in similar cases going forward, particularly as the department continues pursuing individual accountability in commodity-trading bribery cases even after corporate settlements have been reached.