Petrofac: bribery convictions turned a $10bn order book into a 2025 administration filing

Petrofac was a London-listed oilfield services group that designed, built and operated oil and gas facilities across the Middle East - including engineering work on the Petro Rabigh petrochemical plant and Saudi Aramco's Jazan refinery. Its Gulf order book was the core of the business.

That order book was won in part through agents. Between October 2011 and May 2017 Petrofac staff paid about $44m in bribes to secure contracts worth roughly $3.66bn. The UK Serious Fraud Office opened its investigation in 2017 as part of the wider Unaoil probe; by June 2019 the finance chief said some $10bn of contracts had been lost, including $2-3bn of Saudi and Iraqi orders in half a year, while the shares had halved.

In 2019 former sales head David Lufkin admitted 14 counts of bribery involving about $81m of payments. In October 2021 the company itself pleaded guilty to seven counts of failing to prevent bribery; the prosecution suggested a fine of up to $131.5m, but Petrofac could not pay immediately because of terms attached to its Covid-era Treasury loan.

The endgame came in 2025: a restructuring plan collapsed after Dutch grid operator TenneT terminated a major offshore wind contract, and on 27 October Petrofac applied to the UK High Court to appoint administrators, putting around 2,000 Aberdeen jobs at risk.

An estimated $10bn of contracts lost; proposed penalties around $131.5m; administration in 2025 put 2,000 Aberdeen jobs at risk.

Middle East EPC awards ran through local agents whose commissions were partly bribes - a structure the company treated as a cost of doing business until 2017.

The SFO charge sheet named flagship projects such as Petro Rabigh and Jazan, so every Gulf client could read its own name in the indictment.

Once the probe was public the damage ran through the tender pipeline: clients quietly dropped Petrofac from bid lists worth an estimated $10bn.

The eventual fine was survivable; a decade of exclusion from the markets that fed the company was not.

Reputation is the licence to bid. An agent-led sales model that skirts bribery law can win one contract and forfeit every future one - the premium is collected on the whole order book, for a decade.

Petrofac's main holding company entered administration with Teneo overseeing the process, after the TenneT exit killed the restructuring. The administration touches the holding company rather than every operating unit, but the group that once built the Gulf's refineries has been largely written out of bidding for them.