Efforts to bring transparency to the commodity trading sector were given new momentum last month in Switzerland, the global centre for commodity traders. EITI Chair Fredrik Reinfeldt addressed traders at the FT Commodities Summit in Lausanne. This was followed by a meeting with EITI stakeholders and trading companies to address how the EITI Standard can support their efforts to be more transparent when purchasing natural resources.

The EITI International Secretariat, in collaboration with the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, is hosting a meeting on commodity trading transparency in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The purpose of the meeting is to bring together representatives from government, state-owned enterprises, industry and civil society working with commodity trading in order to discuss the various benefits of improved commodity trading transparency, share experiences with reporting on commodity sales,

Oslo, 18 April 2018 -  Gunvor Group, one of the world’s leading commodity trading firms, today announced its support of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the global standard for governance of the natural resources.

The EITI welcomed Gunvor’s commitment and called on more commodity traders to join the work towards comprehensive and practical reporting guidelines that would bring more transparency and accountability to the sector.

In 2015, commodity trading practices in Indonesia were thrown into crisis when fraudulent practices involving Petral, the trading arm of state-owned petroleum company Pertamina were uncovered. The fraud involved overpricing of commodities which led Pertamina to pay imports at almost three times their real value, as well as deviating from proper bidding processes to limit competition and favour a few select traders.