Commodity Traders Rake In Cash During Trump Administration

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A little over two years ago, a cadre of global commodity traders was caught bribing officials across Latin America and Africa to secure lucrative state oil contracts, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. They were forced to pay the U.S. government nearly $2 billion in fines and forfeitures, in exchange for a pause on further criminal charges.

Now, many of those traders have their minds set on influencing the energy and natural resources policy of another country: America. But this time around, the U.S. government hasn’t found itself in an enforcement role facing trading firms charged with major crimes. It’s been actively enriching those firms, even making them coequal partners in key economic and national security projects set to reshape American manufacturing supply chains.

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Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, six major commodity traders––the Gunvor Group, the Mercuria Energy Group, Traxys, Hartree Partners, the Vitol Group, and the Trafigura Group––have ramped up federal lobbying spending tenfold, including through direct contact with the White House. Whereas in 2023 and 2024, those companies spent $500,000 on federal lobbying, in the last two years they’ve spent more than $5 million, according to a new analysis by watchdog group Public Citizen.

The Gunvor Group, which recently rebranded as Centalion, accounts for roughly half the lobbying blitz. The company has been working overtime to rehabilitate its relationship with the federal government, which late last year had labeled it a Russian “puppet.” It underwent a restructuring and relocated to Singapore. The pro-Kremlin designation likely is less damaging now that the Trump administration has waived sanctions on Russian diesel and continues to hype a so far chimerical “energy cease-fire” in the Ukraine war.

The lobbying increase is a drop in the bucket compared to the kinds of profits commodity traders stand to make and have been making, now that they’ve re-emerged at the center of the administration’s multifaceted effort to extract natural resources from abroad. Playing off the extreme volatility in oil markets amid the Iran war, Gunvor reported a more than 600 percent increase year over year in the first half of 2026. Mercuria reported a somewhat less impressive jump in that period, of more than 100 percent.

That’s no accident, the report suggests: The administration has generated business opportunities for these firms on many fronts, and has created the environment of volatility in which commodity traders thrive.

It has loaned millions of barrels of oil to them from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to be paid back in-kind, setting up potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in profits should fuel prices eventually fall to pre–Iran war levels; Gunvor received a loan of more than a million barrels of oil from the U.S. stockpile, and Trafigura alone is poised to make up to $450 million, according to energy expert Hal Connolly. It has tapped Trafigura and Vitol––both trading outfits penalized by the U.S. for foreign bribery schemes back in 2024––to bring Venezuelan oil to market in the aftermath of America’s January 2026 military intervention. And with financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a federal agency tasked with incentivizing the sale of American goods abroad that’s been criticized for “distort[ing] private markets” and shelling out “corporate welfare” to well-connected companies, the administration has created a multibillion-dollar public-private critical minerals venture.

That venture combines a $10 billion loan from the EXIM Bank with $2 billion put up by private investors to finance the mining, transportation, and stockpiling of rare earth elements and other minerals like lithium, cobalt, and copper, which are necessary to build most modern technologies. The project, now known as VaultCo, forms a part of the Trump administration’s China policy, which has advocated weaning the U.S. off critical minerals supply chains long dominated by Chinese-owned companies. So far, policy analysts and lawmakers have lambasted the administration for a host of risks and mission failures associated with the nascent effort.

For one, the EXIM Bank, a financing agency with a $150 million annual administrative budget and only a few hundred full-time staffers, whose congressional authorization is set to expire at the end of this year, has no subject matter expertise in managing the complex logistics of stockpiling billions of dollars’ worth of raw materials meant to supply America’s entire manufacturing and defense industrial base. By comparison, the Department of Energy, which manages America’s oil stockpile, employs tens of thousands of civil servants and contractors, and has a budget of more than $50 billion.

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The work of managing VaultCo has instead been farmed out to commodity traders, chief among them Mercuria and Swiss mining giant Glencore. Despite its principal goal being to decouple American and Chinese supply chains, the venture has so far failed to institute basic requirements for suppliers to report where their minerals are actually being sourced from. Policy analysts and lawmakers have also criticized the EXIM Bank’s deficient conflict-of-interest safeguards, as it opens the federal purse to commodity traders historically implicated in corruption probes. Trump recently sacked the bank’s inspector general, as part of a multiagency purge.

John Jovanovic, the Trump-appointed head of the bank, meanwhile, previously served as Mercuria’s investment director. In May, Mercuria’s current managing director of investments appeared alongside Jarrod Agen, who leads Trump’s newly established Energy Dominance Council, in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, to announce a partnership between the commodity trader and the White House to handle “bulk commodities and gold projects” in the country, which they expect to generate billions in revenue every year.

The main beneficiaries of the administration’s broader critical minerals venture will be those intermediaries, like Mercuria, that have been given the federal government’s blessing and financial backing to extract foreign resources at the lowest price and sell them in the American marketplace at a premium. Those commodity traders may soon have even more leverage. The administration has set a January 1 deadline for American defense manufacturers to stop building with Chinese rare earths, though industry groups have called that timeline unworkable. China still controls about 90 percent of the processing capacity that makes rare earth minerals usable for technology development, and VaultCo has not laid out plans to build refining infrastructure for the materials it stockpiles.

The report highlights how that economic script has played out before. In the months after the 2024 election, commodity traders imported hundreds of thousands of tons of copper to the U.S. above normal domestic demand. After the Trump administration announced 50 percent tariffs on copper in late summer 2025, the domestic price of the material skyrocketed, leading to huge profits for firms like Mercuria, Glencore, and Trafigura.

“A lot of these opportunities that have happened are through the great volatility that Trump has created geopolitically, and those resources have been handed to trading houses,” said Mekedas Belayneh, a co-author of the report. “That raises a lot of questions of whether federal minerals policy is actually fostering competitive markets in a way that commodity traders have been a part of, or if it’s just simply rewarding cronyism.”

The post appeared first on The American Prospect.