NEW YORK/GENEVA (Reuters) – Trafigura TRAFGF.UL and U.S. aluminum producer Ormet Corp (ORMT.PK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) have formed a joint venture to buy bauxite, alumina and aluminum projects, they said on Thursday, as the Swiss trading house looks to build its physical presence in the aluminum market.

Trading houses like Trafigura and rival Vitol, traditionally the middle men on global sales, are looking to acquire physical assets like aluminum smelters as trading profits shrink and stricter derivatives regulations loom.

Any future acquisitions would also cement Trafigura’s position in the 40 million tonne per year aluminum market, which is dominated by Glencore (GLEN.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and large producers Alcoa (AA.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Rio Tinto Alcan (RIO.AX: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)(RIO.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and United Co Rusal (0486.HK: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz)(RUA.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

For its part, Ormet, a small producer in the global market with capacity to produce about 250,000 tonnes of aluminum a year, has secured a partner with deep pockets to expand as the majors have put high-cost, underperforming assets under review.

“We’ve agreed this venture at a crucial time for the global aluminum industry. Although this sector continues to grow, some of its major players are divesting non-core assets,” Trafigura director Simon Collins said in a statement.

Ormet operates an aluminum smelter in Hannibal, Ohio, and in March reopened its alumina refinery in Burnside, Louisiana, which was closed for five years due to low alumina prices. Alumina is a key ingredient for making aluminum.

“This is taking Trafigura from pure trading to investing and doing what they do in other commodities. Ormet has been looking for a new partner,” said a trader who used to work for Trafigura.

GENEVA, May 24 (Reuters) – Libyan-owned Tamoil’s Swiss branch said it will spend “tens of millions” of Swiss francs on its Collombey refinery after cantonal authorities issued an ultimatum on a clean-up of the plant and threatened to force it to suspend operations.

The Swiss canton of Valais, best known for the “Toblerone mountain” and world-class ski resorts, in March published a list of 15 steps it said Tamoil should implement to clean up the 50-year old plant.

If the measures are not completed during the next planned maintenance outages in September and in May-June next year, Tamoil’s refinery will face an operational ban, it said.

“Investments adding up to tens of millions of francs are planned for the next few years,” Tamoil Swiss said in a statement on its website.

Refinery experts told Reuters that the canton’s list of demands would likely cost between $5-10 million.

Tamoil, which bought the plant in 1990 and is now one of the country’s largest fuel retailers, blames delays in its investments to the Libyan revolution last year.

“We regret the decision of Valais authorities which envisages forcing a halt of refining in the case of a delay in implementing our plans and the lack of consideration for the difficulties we faced in 2011,” it said.

GENEVA/SINGAPORE, May 23 (Reuters) – Commodities trader Trafigura said on Wednesday that Singapore would become its main trading centre as it seeks to tap booming regional demand, dealing a blow to Switzerland as a commodities hub.

Asian economic growth led by China is causing a shift in the global demand centre from West to East, prompting a hiring spree among Singapore’s commodity houses.

Trafigura’s decision to rebase its trading centre will hit Swiss government hopes – and revenues – at a time when authorities are seeking to promote trading as a source of alternative income to banking, which has been hit by the financial crisis and inroads into the nation’s cherished tradition of secrecy.

“Trafigura Pte Ltd, the Group’s long established Singaporean entity, will … become the main booking entity for the group’s trading activities,” Trafigura said in a statement.

As part of the expansion, Trafigura’s chief financial officer Pierre Lorinet will move from Geneva to Singapore later this year and take on the additional role of Asia Pacific Managing Director, the firm added.

The move will not affect staff in other offices globally, Trafigura said. Previously, Trafigura’s main centre for trade flows was in Amsterdam, where the company is legally registered.

Trafigura, which says it is the world’s third biggest trader of raw materials, told Reuters earlier this month it was seeking further acquisitions in the region after buying a stake in Nagarjuna Oil Corp Ltd’s planned Indian refinery.

GENEVA, May 18 (Reuters) – BB Energy said on Friday it has hired three commodity finance specialists as the energy trading house seeks to tap alternative sources of funding for downstream acquisitions and its expansion in crude oil trading this summer.

Many small to mid-sized trading houses have seen their credit lines trimmed or cut in the last year as the traditional kings of commodity trade finance, the European banks, have struggled to raise dollar funding.

The diminished availability of funding has coincided with a growing appetite among energy trading houses to acquire physical assets like storage and processing plants to increase the flexibility of their trading books and boost profits.

BB Energy’s head of business development, Jas Grewall, said that new banks had provided additional credit lines but the firm would need fresh sources of financing for downstream oil purchases like storage and distribution networks across Africa and the Middle East.

“The idea is to expand our credit lines by bringing in more diversified, experienced people. We’re starting to look at new means of getting finance like syndications and bonds,” said Grewall.

He declined to comment on the specifics of upcoming purchases.

BB Energy is a global energy trader that employs around 100 people and owns storage assets in Lebanon and Turkey.

ST GALLEN, Switzerland, May 4 (Reuters) – Mining companies will fight growing resource nationalism and could pull out of countries where governments are demanding too large a share of the pie, commodities giant Glencore warned on Fri day, a day after Argentina nationalised the country’s biggest oil firm.

“The mining industry is  forming tight groups among each other on how we are going to fight it…,” Glencore Chief Executive Ivan Glasenberg said.

Glasenberg, speaking at a conference in the Swiss town of St Gallen, warned there would be consequences to producer countries seeking an ever larger share of mining profits, a trend which has risen alongside commodity prices as the main mining constituencies raise taxes and royalties.

Glasenberg, whose company is in the throes of a tie-up with miner Xstrata, warned Glencore would not hesitate to withdraw investments in places like Africa if governments change the terms of existing contracts in their favour.

“African states are going to have to be very careful because there are minerals all over Africa and if they start this nationalism or if they start taking a bigger profit, we will go elsewhere,” he said.

Glencore, the world’s largest diversified commodities trader, operates across Africa, with key production assets on the continent in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Equatorial Guinea.

Glasenberg also said Xstrata, the FTSE 100 miner in which it has a share of almost 34 percent, was holding back on the big copper investment in Argentina.

ST GALLEN, Switzerland (Reuters) – Gaining access to a key Iranian military facility will be the priority for the U.N. nuclear watchdog when it resumes talks with the Islamic state in mid-May, agency head Yukiya Amano said on Friday.

Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said the Vienna-based U.N. body did not yet have a “positive response” from Iran regarding the request for nuclear inspectors to be allowed to visit the Parchin site.

But he told journalists on the sidelines of a conference in the Swiss town of St Gallen, “we would like to pursue this” issue of Parchin, where the IAEA believes nuclear-related military research may have taken place. Iran denies this.

“We need to look at all the outstanding issues, but Parchin is the priority and we should start with that,” Amano said.

Western diplomats say Iran appears to be stonewalling the IAEA’s request to go to Parchin and they suspect it may be “sanitizing” the site southeast of Tehran of any incriminating evidence before any visit, a suspicion Tehran dismisses.

Amano has said the agency has noticed some “activities” at Parchin – a choice of words that Western diplomats interpret as suggesting the IAEA also harbors suspicions of possible clean-up work, on the basis of satellite images at its disposal.

Asked what he meant by “activities”, Amano said on Friday: “We do not have people there so we cannot tell what these activities are.”

GENEVA (Reuters) – Vitol, the world’s largest oil trader, has teamed up with the co-founder of Petroplus, Marcel Van Poecke, to buy the insolvent refiner’s Swiss plant, as part of the trader’s drive to expand into physical assets.

Varo Holding SA, the joint venture between Vitol and Van Poecke’s AtlasInvest, agreed to buy the Cressier plant on Wednesday and will complete the transaction by the end of June, Petroplus administrator Wenger-Plattner said on Thursday.

The 68,000 barrel per day plant will resume activities after the handover is completed, it added, ruling out the prospect that the plant will be converted to storage.

Vitol has previously expressed interest in buying Petroplus assets in the UK and Germany as part of a growing hunger among trading houses to acquire physical assets as trading profits suffer and stricter derivatives regulations loom.

“(This transaction) provides us with access to a quality, niche refinery and a supply chain of storage assets and wholesale marketing opportunities and will become a valuable source of growth for the Vitol Group,” said Vitol’s Chief Executive Ian Taylor.

A spokesman for Vitol declined to comment on the sale price.

Swiss-based trader Gunvor said on Thursday it had completed the acquisition of Petroplus’ Antwerp plant in Belgium and would restart the unit in the next few days after a four-month outage.

May 2 (Reuters) – The fund arm of Swiss-based trading house Trafigura is seeking to raise $1 billion for trade and commodities finance, the company said on Wednesday, as it seeks to expand in a realm traditionally dominated by European banks.

The quest for new funding forms part of a broader drive by Trafigura’s hedge fund Galena to increase its assets under management to $4 billion by the end of 2013.

Trafigura said it will target “liquidity rich but risk averse investors such as pension funds, insurance companies, corporate and family offices.”

Trafigura also said that it has hired a team of three executives from Bank of America Merrill Lynch - Christoph Gugelmann, Stefano Sabbadini and Philip Jan Kok – as part of the trade finance expansion.

“By participating in the financing of commodity trading operations, investors will be able to monetise the value of liquidity in a market that, until recently, has only been open to banks,” said Pierre Lorinet, chief financial officer at Trafigura.

“Notably this initiative will also provide distribution channels for those banks seeking to deleverage their balance sheets.”

BofA Merrill declined to comment on the departures.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (Reuters) – Gold, copper and other commodities could be paid for in yuan within a decade or two, bankers and traders said on Wednesday, provided China pursues its policy of gradually freeing up trade in the currency.

Already the world’s biggest consumer of commodities such as industrial metals and oil, China’s economy is growing more than three times faster than most developed countries.

Chinese customers and end-consumers such as refiners and fabricators now typically pay for such imports with dollars, but bankers at a Financial Times commodities conference in Switzerland think that will change, possibly quite rapidly.

They expect the yuan, also known as the renminbi, to be used increasingly to settle contracts into China and eventually as the basis for commodities trading, at least in Asia.

“There is a great push of the renminbi by China’s government,” Jean-Francois Lambert, managing director and global head of commodity and structured finance at the HSBC (HSBA.L: Quote, Profile, Research) banking group, told Reuters.

Beijing has taken a series of steps in the past two years to promote international use of its currency, notably by allowing exports and imports to be settled in yuan. A thriving yuan deposit market is developing in Hong Kong as a result.

Earlier this month China underscored its intention to keep liberalising its currency regime by doubling the yuan’s daily trading band to 1 percent.

LAUSANNE, Switzerland, April 24 (Reuters) – Efforts to increase regulation of physical trade in commodities such as oil are unlikely to have a big impact on business in this traditionally opaque sector and would be hard to implement, top trading house executives said on Tuesday.

Regulatory initiatives on commodities trading have mostly focused on futures and derivatives, but non-governmental organisations are also calling for stricter rules on disclosure for physical commodities deals.

“I have to say I think the potential for regulation in physically traded markets is relatively benign,” Alex Beard, Glencore’s head of oil, told an FT commodities conference.

“I can’t see a move to a full-blooded trade regulation of physical commodities in the future.”

Oil traders buying from national oil firms could face new disclosure rules within a year if measures being discussed by Norwegian non-governmental organisation the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) come into force.

EITI’s stakeholders include oil traders such as Glencore and oil-producing countries including the United States.

It is relatively rare for oil traders to buy directly from oil producers, although these measures could in theory take effect for those working in countries like Nigeria and Libya.