The accounting firm Deloitte is under investigation by the sector regulator over eight years of its audits into the FTSE 100 commodities and mining company Glencore and a UK subsidiary.
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) said it was looking into whether Deloitte’s audits of Glencore and its subsidiary Glencore Energy UK for the financial years ending 2013 to 2020 “gave sufficient consideration to the risk of non-compliance with laws and regulations”.
Glencore was forced to pay £281m in fines, confiscated profits and costs as punishment in 2022 for charges of seven counts of bribery, in what at the time was the largest ever payment imposed on a company in a UK court.
The court heard how Glencore employees and its agents had paid bribes worth $27m (£20m) to unnamed officials in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea and South Sudan.
Glencore pleaded guilty to the bribery charges, which were brought by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).
Glencore employees flew cash bribes to Africa in private jets and used “sham” documents to hide the true purposes of cash, the SFO told the court during the case.
The investigation announced by the FRC on Wednesday will be conducted by the FRC’s enforcement division. The regulator made the decision to open the investigation at a meeting of its conduct committee in March but did not announce it until now.
The SFO began a sweeping investigation into Glencore in 2019 under the codename Operation Azoth. Last August it charged Glencore’s billionaire former head of oil trading, Alex Beard, with conspiring to make corrupt payments to benefit the commodities company’s oil operations in west Africa.
after newsletter promotion
Beard and five other Glencore executives are due to stand trial in London on bribery charges in 2027.