(Bloomberg) — The two top executives at trading house Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. shared over $1 billion in dividends in 2023, marking one of the biggest paydays for any individual commodity traders in history.
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The vast haul for Chief Executive Officer Marco Dunand and President Daniel Jaeggi cements the pair’s status as some of the biggest beneficiaries of the energy crisis of 2021-2023 that delivered a bonanza to the world’s commodity traders — most of which, like Mercuria, are privately owned. The dividend was included in the company’s audited financial accounts for the period, which haven’t been previously reported.
While larger rivals like Vitol Group and Trafigura Group notched up bigger profits on a corporate level, Dunand and Jaeggi’s majority stake in Mercuria has made them some of the highest paid individual traders.
The two former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bankers have gradually lifted their shareholding in Mercuria since joining what had been a niche business focused on Russian crude two decades ago, and turning it into a global trader.
In the audited accounts for the nine months ended September 2023, Mercuria said that it had paid dividends of $2.13 billion in 2023 — a 307% increase on the previous year, and by far the company’s highest dividend ever. Of that sum, $1.93 billion was paid in cash, with the remainder through loan activity, according to the accounts.
Separate filings show that Dunand and Jaeggi own about 64% of the voting shares in Mercuria’s holding company. Dunand has a slightly larger stake than Jaeggi, but the ownership figures imply that each man’s share of the record dividend was well over $500 million.
A spokesperson for Mercuria declined to comment.
Those are likely to be some of the biggest single individual paydays in commodity trading history. Glencore Plc former CEO Ivan Glasenberg’s near 10% stake means his share of the company’s $6.45 billion in dividends in 2023 was of a similar magnitude.
Vitol and Trafigura have made record annual payouts of more than $5 billion to their employee-shareholders in recent years, but their ownership is far more widely spread.
Gunvor Group, which is more than 80% owned by CEO Torbjörn Törnqvist, has paid smaller dividends in recent years, though it paid a total of $2 billion in 2015 and 2016 as it sold off its assets in Russia to allow Törnqvist to complete the buyout of co-founder Gennady Timchenko after the US imposed sanctions on him.
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Mercuria said in 2023 that Dunand and Jaeggi were personally investing alongside the company in a $500 million nature investment vehicle called Silvania.
The Mercuria accounts show that the company made profits of $1.8 billion in the nine months to September 2023, compared with $3 billion in the 12 months to December 2022. The company changed its financial year end to September “to capture the full seasonality of the gas and power business within a financial reporting period,” it said. Bloomberg reported last year that its profits for the 12 months ended December 2023 were about $2.7 billion.
The commodity trading bonanza has faded in the past year, but the windfall is continuing to reshape the sector, as cash-rich energy traders plough their profits into new markets and into assets such as refineries and power stations. Mercuria has embarked on a hiring spree, bringing in high-profile executives from rivals to build its presence in liquefied natural gas and metals.
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