Four industry sources told Reuters on Thursday that a couple of veteran executives from global trading house Glencore’s energy desk in Moscow have left the company with around a dozen other staff to focus on their own start-up.
After decades of service during which they oversaw the trading of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Russia’s top producer Rosneft and others, Vladimir Scherbak and Svetlana Astakhova quit the firm this week, the sources said, adding that the two managers will head up a new firm called Alliance Industry Group. Glencore, which holds a minority stake in Rosneft, declined to comment.
Part of Glencore’s energy team based in Moscow is staying with the group, the Reuters sources said. The trading firm’s grain and metal business in Russia were also unaffected by the move.
A source at a Russian oil company which is working with Glencore said the energy desk changes are unlikely to affect the trading house’s business in Russia, the world’s second-biggest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.
“We rarely work with Glencore in Moscow. All business issues are managed by their London office with whom we normally communicate,” the source said.
The sources did not say why Scherbak and Astakhova had decided to leave, but one said the departure was by ‘mutual consent’ with Glencore.
According to the SPARK Interfax companies database, Scherbak and Astakhova co-own Alliance Industry Group with a third stakeholder, Anton Ostaltsev. It is registered in Moscow at the same address as Glencore’s Moscow office on Novinsky Boulevard.
