Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on December 2, 2025
4 min readLast updated: January 20, 2026
Gunvor's new CEO Gary Pedersen confirms no rebranding plans amid US pressure over Russian ties, focusing on stability and management restructuring.
By Shariq Khan and Robert Harvey
NEW YORK/LONDON, Dec 2 (Reuters) - Gunvor's new CEO, Gary Pedersen, said on Tuesday there were no immediate plans to rebrand the Swiss-based commodities trader, a day after he took over in an abrupt management buyout less than a month after the U.S. Treasury described Gunvor as "the Kremlin's puppet."
Gunvor is one of the world's largest oil trading houses, buying and selling the equivalent of 3% of the world's oil supply every day. The company was founded 25 years ago by Swedish billionaire Torbjorn Tornqvist and Russian oligarch Gennady Timchenko. The two grew the company into the largest trader of Russian oil in the 2000s.
Monday's management buyout, which Gunvor described as a "definitive reset" aimed at clearing "misperceptions about its past," marked the end of Tornqvist's 25-year leadership of Gunvor. The leadership transition also made Pedersen the first American to lead a major Swiss commodities trading firm in decades.
CORE BANKS 'ARE WITH US': CEO
Among Pedersen's immediate challenges is managing the fallout from the U.S. Treasury statement in early November that sank Gunvor's planned purchase of Russian oil company Lukoil's international assets and inflicted reputational damage that made Spanish bank Santander withdraw from a funding arrangement with Gunvor.
Pedersen must allay concerns that more of Gunvor's creditors and business partners could break ties with the company.
"All of our core banks that we were actually signed with are with us," Pedersen said in an interview with Reuters.
Pedersen stressed it was business as usual for the trading house. His focus was on getting set up and making progress with the company's new management structure, he said.
There were no immediate plans to rebrand Gunvor, he added, and said the brand was strong.
"My goal right now is to just be as little disruptive as possible," Pedersen said.
The U.S. government kept the pressure up on Gunvor on Tuesday when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on social media that Santander had set a good example by pulling credit lines for Gunvor. The post linked to the original "Kremlin's puppet" statement.
Gunvor declined to comment on Bessent's post. The Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for further comment, nor did Santander.
FAST RISE
Pedersen has moved quickly since joining Gunvor about a year ago from hedge fund Millennium Management, where he had overseen fuel trading for about two years.
Though the buyout was sudden, Pedersen said a partnership with him at the helm had been in the works since 2023, when talks began about joining Gunvor, he said.
"We knew that there was a potential for this opportunity of taking over," Pedersen said.
Gunvor's performance has been good in the second half of this year, Pedersen said. The company has a strong team of traders despite some turnover earlier this year, he added.
Oil-focused trading houses such as Gunvor experienced a rough start to this year as a fall in benchmark prices caught some off guard. Profits across the industry shrank from the record levels of preceding years. Gunvor struggled with some misplaced crude bets last year and lost some senior trading executives, including its global head of crude.
RISK-TAKER WITH PHYSICAL AND FUND EXPERIENCE
Pedersen has a reputation for making bold market calls and taking big trading positions, oil traders at rival mercantile houses said.
Pedersen, who was born in Nebraska, spent the first two decades of his energy career in various roles with private U.S. conglomerate Koch before joining U.S. fuel trader Northville in 2016.
Pedersen's former colleagues say he has expertise in both crude and fuel trading and an eye for the big picture.
Two people who worked with Pedersen said that moving to Gunvor, a large trading house with a large portfolio of physical assets, could be a better fit for his aggressive trading than the more financially oriented operation at Millennium.
Pedersen said combining his skill sets from physical and financial trading shops was what drew him to Gunvor.
"I always had a feeling, if we could merge those two, could we just do so much better on our returns on equity?" he said.
(Reporting by Shariq Khan in New York and Robert Harvey in London; Editing by Rod Nickel, Alex Lawler and Simon Webb)
A management buyout occurs when a company's existing management team purchases the assets and operations of the business they manage, often using borrowed funds.
A commodities trader is a professional who buys and sells physical goods such as oil, metals, and agricultural products in the commodities market.
Reputational damage refers to the harm done to a company's reputation due to negative publicity or events, which can lead to loss of customers and revenue.
A trading house is a company that specializes in buying and selling commodities, often engaging in international trade and financial transactions.
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