GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Trafigura, the world’s third largest commodities trading company, announced it will be moving its legal headquarters from Geneva to Singapore, lured by lower taxes and proximity to China.
Trafigura Pte, a Singaporean incorporated entity will become the company’s headquarters for its trading division later this year, with its chief financial officer, Pierre Lorinet, moving to the southeast Asian city. He will join a team of 150 traders already there. The Financial Times reports that the company will maintain its team of traders in Geneva.
Geneva competes with London, Zug, Dubai and Singapore as the world’s largest commodities trading center, due to it low corporate taxes and access to trade financing. But whilst Geneva and Zug offer trading houses rates as low as 10 percent as compared to 24 percent in London, in Singapore those rates could be as low as 5 percent.
Geneva is the base for other major commodity traders including Gunvor, Vitol and Mercuria.
Links to other sources: Reuters
A concerted effort by twitter users 13 October has forced a London law firm to alter the terms of a high court injunction which prohibited the Guardian newspaper from reporting a story on toxic waste dumped off the coast of Ivory Coast. Less than an hour after “twitterati” and bloggers broke the news themselves, the law firm that demanded the injunction, Carter-Ruck, telephoned Guardian lawyers to say that they had asked for the injunction to be altered.
The Guardian received the injunction from Carter-Ruck on 11 September in response to a story about an oil and gas exploration firm, Trafigura, which allegedly had dumped toxic waste in the sea off the Ivory Coast and is being sued by 31,000 Ivoreans. The terms of the injunction prohibited the newspaper from reporting on a parliamentary debate about a report into the alleged incident. The Guardian, Wall Street Journal
