Vitol

Vitol has moved more physical crude than any other independent house for decades, and stayed almost invisible while doing it. Henk Vietor and Jacques Detiger founded it in Rotterdam in 1966; today it is owned by its current and former employee-partners, a structure that comes with an intense culture of privacy and no appetite for an IPO.

Principal trading runs out of Geneva, Houston, London, and Singapore, while the legal holding entity stays registered in Rotterdam. The business reaches far past the trading desk: upstream oil and gas, refining, storage, shipping, LNG and LPG, coal, metals, and a downstream retail network of service stations through Vivo Energy. For all that scale, the partnership keeps its numbers and its people out of view.