<\/p>\n
Trading house Gunvor’s founder Torbjorn Tornqvist has increased his stake in the firm after a bumper profit year as he bought out some leaving partners and expanded the board to bring in a new generation of managers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The company said Tornqvist, Gunvor’s chairman, had raised his stake to 86.9% as of Dec 31, 2020, from 80.01% as of Dec 31, 2019.<\/p>\n
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“It is a standard annual fluctuation based on staff turnover,” a Gunvor spokesman said. The remaining shares are held by Gunvor employees.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Trading houses in 2020 benefited from energy market volatility. Rival Trafigura reported an almost two-fold jump in profits to $1.6 billion.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gunvor has yet to report results for 2020.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 2019, it reported net profit of $381 million, which means that even during a modest year, Tornqvist’s share of net profit exceeded $300 million.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
While most trading houses, including Vitol, Glencore and Trafigura, have gone through a transition of power from founders to a next generation of leaders, Tornqvist has run Gunvor since its inception in 2000.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gunvor did not say how many shareholders departed, but that, over the last year, the executive board has been expanded to 11 members from 7 previously. All board members are shareholders in Gunvor.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The spokesman said the board expansion reflected the growing role of U.S. trading operations and increased trading in liquefied natural gas.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“This composition better reflects the company\u2019s key regions, desks and priorities,” the spokesman said. “This is part of ongoing work to strengthen corporate governance and broaden the decision-making base”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
New board members include U.S. managing director David Garza, the head of U.S. gasoline trading Dmitri Sinenko, legal and compliance head Jean-Baptiste Leclercq, the head of accounting, credit, risk and tax Benjamin Wasem and co-head of LNG Kalpesh Patel.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gunvor has become the world’s biggest trader in LNG and has built from scratch a North American desk with 120 employees.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov; editing by David Evans and Barbara Lewis)<\/em><\/p>\n maritime professional<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trading house Gunvor’s founder Torbjorn Tornqvist has increased his stake in the firm after a bumper profit year as he bought out some leaving partners and expanded the board to bring in a new generation of managers. The company said Tornqvist, Gunvor’s chairman, had raised his stake to 86.9% as of Dec 31, 2020, from …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24931,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[1627,1104,4685,1855,2298,1254],"class_list":["post-24930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-maritime-news","tag-board","tag-expands","tag-founder","tag-gunvor","tag-raises","tag-stake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/24931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}