Why Governments Should Read the Fine Print on Trafigura and its Nyrstar Asset Base

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation published a story that Belgian and European regulators, prosecutors and politicians would do well to read closely (see the original article via the button below). ABC News reports that Nyrstar Collective had warned Australian governments about exactly the pattern now playing out at Nyrstar's Port Pirie and Hobart smelters: public money flowing into a company controlled by commody giant Trafigura even as the trading house books extraordinary profits and pays its owners handsomely.

Billions in Profit and Dividends, Millions in Public Money

The numbers alone should give any taxpayer pause. The Australian governements have committed roughly USD 166 million in “transitionary” support to Trafigura to keep Nyrstar facilities in Port Pirie and Hobart running while feasibility studies explore whether the plants can pivot into antimony, bismuth, germanium and indium production. In the same window, Trafigura reported a net profit of USD 4.1 billion for the first half of 2026 alone, on top of a substantial full-year 2025 profit, and continued to distribute significant dividends to its partners.

A company capable of that kind of return is, by any ordinary commercial logic, capable of funding the ongoing modernisation of two strategically valuable zinc smelters itself — particularly since much of the groundwork was already paid for. Hundreds of millions of dollars had been invested by the smelters' previous owner, the Belgian-listed Nyrstar NV, turning the sites into multi-metal processing facilities well before Trafigura took full ownership through the 2019 restructuring. Trafigura inherited that investment; taxpayers are now being asked to fund its continuation under the banner of critical-minerals sovereignty and supply-chain security.

That framing is not wrong on its own terms. The West's dependence on Chinese processing of antimony, germanium and indium is real, and Port Pirie and Hobart are genuine strategic assets. But it conveniently separates the industrial-policy argument from an uncomfortable ownership question: how did a Singapore-based commodities trader end up as the sole gatekeeper of these assets in the first place, and should that history have any bearing on how governments now negotiate support for Nyrstar and Trafigura?

Restructuring, Regulators and a Criminal Probe

Anyone who has followed Nyrstar's European story already knows the answer is not straightforward. Shareholders, organised through the Nyrstar Collective, have already spent seven years in courts arguing that the restructuring by which Trafigura got a hold of nearly all Nyrstar’s operational assets, was pushed through in breach of governance rules and company law. Belgium's financial regulator, the FSMA, has itself flagged irregularities in Nyrstar's communications strategy, with a conviction and an administrative fine for market manipulation. Meanwhile, an investigating judge has more recently placed the company under formal criminal suspicion for forgery, filing false accounts and misuse of corporate assets — serious enough that a planned shareholder vote on dissolving the company had to be shelved. None of that has been resolved. The ownership of the underlying assets has not yet been conclusively settled by a court.

It is against that backdrop that Trafigura's chief executive, Richard Holtum, recently published an op-ed calling on European policymakers to “protect” the continent's metal smelters as strategic assets. That call landed just weeks after a Nyrstar and Trafigura delegation met Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who has made reclaiming strategic industries, starting with nuclear power, a personal priority. The irony did not escape the Nyrstar Collective: Trafigura is simultaneously relocating its European headquarters to Bermuda even as it asks European taxpayers to underwrite “its” smelters. Moreover, it was Trafigura itself that took Nyrstar out of European control in the first place. Nyrstar’s operational assets were transferred to Trafigura for pennies on the dollar. Reclaiming these assets, starts not with subsidies but with the willingness to enforce the rule of law and correct past mistakes.

Seen side by side, the European and Australian cases describe the same structure: Trafigura itself as the indispensable guardian of a strategically important asset base, attempting to extract public support from governments anxious about supply-chain security, while the group's own accounts show it can well afford to invest itself in its smelters but instead prefers to lean on government subsidies while paying out a royal dividend stream. In Australia, it is being financed with taxpayer money without, it seems, the same scrutiny of how Trafigura came to control the assets in question. Now that Nyrstar has been placed under criminal suspicion, will Belgian and European authorities extend it the same legitimacy as Australia does, without asking how Trafigura came to control the assets in the first place?

The Question No Government Has Answered

None of this means Port Pirie, Hobart or Europe's remaining Nyrstar production sites should be left to close. Losing that processing capacity to China would be a genuine strategic loss. Moreover, workers should not pay the price for a dispute about corporate governance. But strategic autonomy built on an unresolved ownership dispute is not autonomy at all. It is dependence with better branding. Before the next cheque is written, on either side of the world, governments and regulators owe their taxpayers a straightforward answer to a straightforward question: who actually is the legally entitled owner of these assets, and on what terms were they acquired? Australians are only now starting to ask it. In Belgium, we have been asking it for seven years.

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