Yahoo Finance Glencore's chief Ivan Glasenberg to step down from trading firm
The billionaire boss of Glencore is to step down from the commodity trading firm next year, in a shift away from the management team that crystallised colossal fortunes during the company’s 2011 flotation.
Ivan Glasenberg, 63, who has been chief executive for 18 years, is to be replaced next year by Gary Nagle, the 45-year-old head of the firm’s coal assets, marking a shift to a younger generation of executives at the business.
The departing boss burst on to the City’s radar nine years ago as his company’s flotation revealed his paper fortune of nearly £6bn – a figure so large that his 3,600 neighbours in the Swiss village of Rüschlikon got a tax cut.
Related: Glencore shares slide as it scraps £2bn dividend and posts first-half loss
Glasenberg’s close lieutenants, Daniel Maté, Telis Mistakidis, Tor Peterson and Alex Beard, all owned stakes worth about £2bn at that time – but, aside from Glasenberg, only Peterson remains on Glencore’s executive management team and investors have long been expecting a succession plan.
Glencore was founded in 1974 by the controversial metals trader Marc Rich but, in 1983, he was indicted on charges described by the then US attorney for New York, Rudolph Giuliani, as “the biggest tax evasion case in United States history”.
Rich was also charged with buying millions of barrels of oil from Iran during the 1979-81 hostage crisis, flouting a ban on “trading with the enemy”. He fled to Switzerland and remained on the FBI’s most-wanted list until he was controversially pardoned by Bill Clinton in the final hours of his presidency in 2001.
By then, Rich had long lost control of the company following a management buyout in 1993 that included Glasenberg.
Glencore’s chairman, Tony Hayward, said: “The board has worked with Ivan over the past two years to oversee a seamless transition to the next generation of leadership across Glencore’s business.”
Related: Glencore's $1.5bn coalmine a step closer after Queensland grants special status
Nagle, a 45-year-old South African, takes over a company facing pressure from investors to cut carbon emissions. “We have decided that over the next six months I will be working closely with Gary Nagle who will be taking over from me,” Glasenberg said. “Gary started with me in the coal division 21 years ago.”
Glasenberg is likely to be remembered in the City for presiding over a company whose share price stubbornly refused to rise above its float price, which massively affected his paper fortune.
Glencore has also attracted the attention of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office, which launched an investigation into suspicions of bribery at the mining and commodity trading group a year ago. Glencore said at the time it would cooperate with the investigation.
