Glencore
PLC said it has revamped its ethics and compliance program, including boosting its annual compliance spending and hiring more full-time compliance staff, as the global mining and trading company settles corruption and bribery charges in the U.S., U.K. and Brazil.
The Anglo-Swiss commodities company published a 13-page investor update on the same day it announced the settlements with various regulators, saying it has “invested substantial resources” in its ethics and compliance program and has renewed its commitment to integrity and transparency.
On Tuesday, Glencore said it would pay at least $1.2 billion and two business units would plead guilty to bribery in the U.K. and to conspiracy to violate U.S. anticorruption laws, resolving criminal probes that have hung over the business for years.
The guilty pleas and fines, covering a range of misdeeds including market manipulation and bribery, are related to Glencore’s past commercial conduct in the developing countries where it and other trading powerhouses obtain minerals and other resources and ferry them around the world.
Glencore said in the update published Tuesday that it has appointed new board members over the past four years and revamped its code of conduct. Its employees have received extensive training on the code as well as on anticorruption, bribery and market conduct policy, according to the update. The company also has a global “Raising Concerns” program that allows employees to report potential misconduct anonymously.
Glencore said its annual compliance spending has increased more than 10-fold since 2016. It also said it quadrupled its full-time compliance staff since 2016, including hiring a dedicated head of compliance in 2020, according to the report.
Representatives for Glencore declined to comment.
Glencore had revenue of $150.7 billion for 2021 and about 135,000 total employees, according to FactSet. The business had 61 full-time group compliance staff and 15 full-time local compliance officers, according to the company’s 74-page 2021 ethics and compliance report. It has another 52 part-time compliance coordinators and 54 part-time support staff.
By comparison, more than half of the respondents working for companies with $3 billion or more in revenue have 15 or fewer compliance employees, according to a March 2020 benchmark survey of 1,399 individuals about compliance staffing and budget across industries conducted by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. About 17% of respondents working for companies with revenue north of $3 billion have more than 50 employees in their compliance and ethics group, according to the survey results.
For companies with more than 100,000 employees, 37% of respondents said they have more than 50 employees in their compliance and ethics group, according to the survey results.
Write to Mengqi Sun at [email protected]
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