The US Treasury Secretary has praised Santander for reportedly withdrawing from a Gunvor credit facility after Washington branded the oil trader “the Kremlin’s puppet”.
US Treasury chief Scott Bessent said the Spanish bank had “set a good example by pulling its credit lines for Gunvor” in a December 2 post on X.
The comments appeared to refer to a November Bloomberg report that Santander withdrew from a US$2.8bn financing package for the Swiss commodity trader’s US operations because of the Trump administration’s stance.
Gunvor abandoned plans to buy the international assets of sanctioned Russian oil firm Lukoil after a November 6 social media post from the US Treasury Department warned that “as long as Putin continues the senseless killings, the Kremlin’s puppet, Gunvor, will never get a license to operate and profit”.
Gunvor declined to comment on the latest tweet. The trader previously called the initial post from the US Treasury “fundamentally misinformed and false”.
Santander did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Madrid-headquartered lender has not participated in Gunvor’s debt facilities in recent years, according to the lists of banks included in announcements from the trader reviewed by GTR.
Santander was not set to be a significant contributor to the US financing deal, Bloomberg reported.
Bessent’s post came a day after Gunvor announced sweeping governance changes under which co-founder and majority owner Torbjörn Törnqvist will sell his stake in the company through a management buyout.
Gary Pedersen, a US citizen who joined the trader last year from Millenium Management LLC, was appointed chief executive in place of Törnqvist.
“The buy-out has been advanced at this time to establish a definitive reset and path forward for a company for which misperceptions about its past have become an impossible distraction,” Gunvor said in a statement.
Gunvor has long been linked to Russia because its co-founder, billionaire Gennady Timchenko, was born in the country and is reportedly a confidant of President Vladimir Putin.
Timchenko sold his stake in Gunvor in 2014, just days before he was first sanctioned by the US over Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
Gunvor also won lucrative export contracts after the Russian government broke up privately-owned oil company Yukos in the early 2000s.
