Vitol CFO to retire from secretive trading giant

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Vitol’s long-serving chief financial officer Jeff Dellapina is retiring to be replaced by its Asia finance chief Jay Ng in a handover that continues a changing of the guard across the commodity trading industry.

Dellapina joined Vitol in 2005 from JPMorgan and has helped the privately held commodity trader chart a period of tremendous growth. The 62-year-old executive will be stepping down in the next few months after more than 15 years as CFO, the company confirmed on Tuesday.

Ng, who began his career at PwC, joined Vitol in 2008 and has sat on the company’s eight-person executive board since 2024. While Dellapina was based in London, Ng is expected to remain in Singapore where he is currently based.

The transition at Vitol follows similar changes at rival trading houses following a highly profitable period that started with the Covid pandemic in 2020 and continued with the fallout from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

At Trafigura, both the CEO and CFO have changed in the past two years, while in December the 72-year-old chief executive and co-founder of Gunvor, Torbjörn Törnqvist, announced he was stepping down and selling his 86 per cent stake to its senior employees.

Vitol, which was founded 60 years ago in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, has been especially profitable in the past five years.

The privately held group does not publish its results but accounts filed by Vitol’s holding company in Luxembourg show its earnings soared from $2.3bn in 2019 to a record $15.1bn in 2022, $13.2bn in 2023 and $8.7bn in 2024.

The bumper earnings have meant huge payouts for the nearly 600 senior staff that own the company. In 2024 alone, Vitol returned $10.6bn to its employee owners, representing an average of more than $17.5mn per partner, although senior executives like Dellapina are likely to have received much more.

Dellapina, himself a former investment banker, was well liked by Vitol’s lenders and a fierce defender of Vitol’s privately owned model.

Asked in 2024 whether Vitol would ever consider an initial public offering, Dellapina told the FT that there was “no chance” while he was CFO. “I have a vote in it, not the deciding vote, but I’m sure I could rally enough people to kill any prospect of that ever happening,” he said.