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(Bloomberg) — Commodity trading giant Vitol Group paid out $5.9 billion to its executives and senior staff through share buybacks last year, even as its profits more than halved to $4.2 billion. 

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The 2025 results are the latest example of how a small group of commodity traders continue to reap spectacular riches in the wake of a profit boom sparked by the energy crisis early this decade. While a retreat from recent years, the profit is still higher than any year prior to 2021 and brings the company’s total profits since 2022 to $41 billion. Vitol, the world’s largest commodity trading house by revenue, is owned by roughly 600 of its employees. 

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Vitol is the latest major commodity trader to have lifted payouts to its partners above annual profits, as the boom-time gains from the last energy crisis have faded. As a result, the trading house’s equity value dropped from $30.6 billion to $29.1 billion at the end of the year. In contrast, smaller rival Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. has been retaining profits in order to grow its equity base as it embarks on an ambitious growth push in metals and liquefied natural gas.

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Energy markets this year have faced a further spike in the price volatility and dislocations that commodity traders like Vitol tend to thrive on, although the initial chaos caused by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz also presented challenges. 

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Bloomberg reported in April that the company incurred mark to market losses in the early days of the Iran war, but that it also made around a $2 billion profit in the first quarter of the year.

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“The ongoing financial effect of the geopolitical tensions on the group cannot currently be estimated with certainty,” Vitol said in its audited annual accounts. 

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Vitol was also one of two traders picked at the start of the year to exclusively market Venezuela’s crude oil. 

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The company revealed in its annual accounts that a deal with Eni SpA in the Republic of Congo had been terminated after conditions precedent had not been met. It had last year announced a deal to buy a stake in an LNG plant in the country.

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Vitol has been undergoing a generational transition period at the top of the company, with Asia finance boss Jay Ng becoming CFO in April after longstanding CFO Jeff Dellapina stepped down. Meanwhile Matt Stacey, Vitol’s global head of distillates and chief legal officer Jonathan Marsh have joined its executive committee.

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