Link to Article: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexico-president-says-foreign-companies-transported-contraband-fuel-2021-10-11/
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, while releasing a blanket statement that many foreign corporations are transporting their energy sources to Mexico illegitimately, specifically accused the Swiss company Trafigura, a global fuel provider, of illegally importing their fuel into Mexico and announced an investigation into their Mexican trade activity. Mexico is concerned with both falsified documentation of fuel brought into the country as well as smuggling and has henceforth launched a campaign to staunch the flow of illegal oil into the country. Alongside their investigation into Trafigura, the energy ministry in Mexico is in the process of revoking four of Trafigura’s import permits. Trafigura’s only response has been that they followed all import laws and regulations and has offered files from their company’s trade dealings as evidence to refute the claims against them. Mexico is simultaneously attempting to crack down on the energy behemoth Vitol, also a Swiss fuel company, for possible tax evasion due to discrepancies in the records of their refined oil goods.
I think that this new relationship between Mexico and oil companies could mean a new chapter for international oil producers and how they are seen and handled by foreign governments. Should it be concluded that there is indeed corruption within Vitol or Trafigura, there would be untold repercussions, namely a new scar on the marred reputation of the oil industry’s morals as a whole. In an extreme case, the entire world might end up reevaluating their trade with Vitol, Trafigura, or other oil companies in a global prosecution of any illegal affairs that they or other corporations might be concealing.
This shows how MNCs like Trafigura and Vitol make a big impact on one country’s economy like Mexico and how, as an organization without the principles of NGOs that work to relieve poverty or to provide medical nor the hard bone structure of governments in an IGO, balance is often lacking. The boundaries of how far MNCs can take their operations or how much corruption they can sustain comes from the pushback of multiple or individual governments, like in this scenario with Mexico, which shape the space MNCs are allowed to fill. MNCs are unique in the level of freedom and structure flexibility that they exercise where decisions don’t have to come from a vote of the people and they can chose to head into new directions with the products that they sell or the market that they are targeting. These attributes are what allows them to evolve exceedingly well over time.