CAMPOS, Brazil (Reuters) – A Brazilian prosecutor plans to file criminal charges against Chevron Corp and some of its local managers within weeks, adding the threat of prison sentences to an $11 billion civil lawsuit as punishment for a November offshore oil spill.

The filing in federal court in Campos, Brazil, will likely include a request for criminal indictment of George Buck, chief executive of Chevron’s Brazil unit, as well as other staff, three Brazilian government officials involved in the case told Reuters.

Transocean Ltd, whose rig was used in the operation, and some of its employees in Brazil are also expected to be charged, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because the case has not been presented to a judge. It is up to a judge to determine whether to accept the charges and proceed with indictments.

The backlash against the Chevron spill has highlighted the risks that energy companies face as they rush to get a piece of Brazil’s oil bonanza. Chevron’s legal troubles come as new oil rules give Brazil’s government more control over the country’s vast oil wealth. The regulatory overhaul has also delayed investment projects and new drilling licenses.

Buck and Chevron acted in a “careless and irresponsible way,” an official who investigated the 2,400-barrel spill told Reuters.

The official said it is unlikely that people facing charges will be arrested in the near term or be barred from leaving Brazil. As the case advances and more evidence is collected, however, such measures could be applied, the official added.

When Reuters informed Chevron that charges were pending, company spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said “Chevron believes that the charges are without merit.”

CAMPOS, Brazil (Reuters) – A Brazilian prosecutor plans to file criminal charges against Chevron Corp and some of its local managers within weeks, adding the threat of prison sentences to an $11 billion civil lawsuit as punishment for a November offshore oil spill.

The filing in federal court in Campos, Brazil, will likely include a request for criminal indictment of George Buck, chief executive of Chevron’s Brazil unit, as well as other staff, three Brazilian government officials involved in the case told Reuters.

Transocean Ltd, whose rig was used in the operation, and some of its employees in Brazil are also expected to be charged, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because the case has not been presented to a judge. It is up to a judge to determine whether to accept the charges and proceed with indictments.

The backlash against the Chevron spill has highlighted the risks that energy companies face as they rush to get a piece of Brazil’s oil bonanza. Chevron’s legal troubles come as new oil rules give Brazil’s government more control over the country’s vast oil wealth. The regulatory overhaul has also delayed investment projects and new drilling licenses.

Buck and Chevron acted in a “careless and irresponsible way,” an official who investigated the 2,400-barrel spill told Reuters.

The official said it is unlikely that people facing charges will be arrested in the near term or be barred from leaving Brazil. As the case advances and more evidence is collected, however, such measures could be applied, the official added.

When Reuters informed Chevron that charges were pending, company spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said “Chevron believes that the charges are without merit.”

CAMPOS, Brazil (Reuters) – A Brazilian prosecutor plans to file criminal charges against Chevron Corp and some of its local managers within weeks, adding the threat of prison sentences to an $11 billion civil lawsuit as punishment for a November offshore oil spill.

The filing in federal court in Campos, Brazil, will likely include a request for criminal indictment of George Buck, chief executive of Chevron’s Brazil unit, as well as other staff, three Brazilian government officials involved in the case told Reuters.

Transocean Ltd, whose rig was used in the operation, and some of its employees in Brazil are also expected to be charged, according to the officials, who requested anonymity because the case has not been presented to a judge. It is up to a judge to determine whether to accept the charges and proceed with indictments.

The backlash against the Chevron spill has highlighted the risks that energy companies face as they rush to get a piece of Brazil’s oil bonanza. Chevron’s legal troubles come as new oil rules give Brazil’s government more control over the country’s vast oil wealth. The regulatory overhaul has also delayed investment projects and new drilling licenses.

Buck and Chevron acted in a “careless and irresponsible way,” an official who investigated the 2,400-barrel spill told Reuters.

The official said it is unlikely that people facing charges will be arrested in the near term or be barred from leaving Brazil. As the case advances and more evidence is collected, however, such measures could be applied, the official added.

When Reuters informed Chevron that charges were pending, company spokesman Kurt Glaubitz said “Chevron believes that the charges are without merit.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Amid the drama of Iran, the meltdown of refiner Petroplus and a wave of upbeat economic data, it was all too easy to overlook one of the most important short-term factors shaping oil markets this week: the reweighting of the world’s biggest commodity indexes.

The S&P GSCI Index .SPGSCI and the DJ-UBS Index .DJUBS, the world’s no. 1 and no. 2 commodity indexes, announced two months ago plans to rejig their component weights to reflect growing trade in European benchmark Brent crude, at the expense of U.S. WTI, which some traders say had become detached from global prices.

The transition is now nigh: over the course of five days next week, pension funds and investors who have an estimated $180 billion (116 billion pounds) tracking those indexes will transfer their holdings from prompt futures contracts into later months. This month’s “roll”, as it’s called, is particularly important because it will also adjust for the new target weights, hiking the indexes’ exposure to Brent and cutting their WTI holdings.

In one of the biggest such re-weightings in years, funds will need to sell off more than $6 billion worth of U.S. crude futures and buy up more than $5.4 billion of Brent crude, analysts estimates, likely creating short-term tremors in the market.

Anticipation of the roll is already affecting prices, with the closely watched Brent/WTI spread expanding nearly $3 a barrel to near its widest point since mid-November, reflecting a bigger premium for European oil over landlocked U.S. crude.

“We think reweighting has an impact on pricing and widening the spread,” said Sarah Emerson, president, Energy Security Analysis Inc. in Boston. “I don’t think it will be a dramatic one, but the reweighting is a factor.”

The index roll is just the latest factor to roil the Brent/WTI spread, which gapped to a record $28 a last year as a surge in U.S. onshore “tight oil” production and a reduction in both Libyan and North Sea supplies in Europe created an unprecedented distortion between the world’s most-traded contracts.

TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan (Reuters) – Late in the summer of 2010, hundreds of farmers in northern Michigan were fuming.

All had signed leases with local brokers permitting drillers to tap natural gas and oil beneath their land. All were demanding thousands of dollars in bonuses they had been promised in exchange. But none knew for certain whom to go after.

That’s because the company rejecting their leases hadn’t signed them to begin with. In fact, the company issuing the rejections wasn’t much of a business at all. It was a shell company – a paper-only firm with no real operations – called Northern Michigan Exploration LLC.

One jilted land owner, Eric Boyer-Lashuay, called to complain to the broker who had handled his lease. Northern, he recalls saying, is “a shell company … a blank door with no one behind it.”

Today, he puts it this way: “It was all a fake, all a scam.”

Northern has voided hundreds of land deals, and was indeed a facade – a shell company created so that one of America’s largest energy companies could conceal its role in the leasing spree, a Reuters investigation has found. Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy Corp. (CHK.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the nation’s second-largest gas driller, was behind the entire operation.

Chesapeake had created one shell company that set up another, Northern Michigan Exploration. Next, Northern hired brokers who signed leases with residents such as Boyer-Lashuay. And those brokers were under strict orders not to divulge Chesapeake’s role, records reviewed by Reuters show.

TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan (Reuters) – Late in the summer of 2010, hundreds of farmers in northern Michigan were fuming.

All had signed leases with local brokers permitting drillers to tap natural gas and oil beneath their land. All were demanding thousands of dollars in bonuses they had been promised in exchange. But none knew for certain whom to go after.

That’s because the company rejecting their leases hadn’t signed them to begin with. In fact, the company issuing the rejections wasn’t much of a business at all. It was a shell company – a paper-only firm with no real operations – called Northern Michigan Exploration LLC.

One jilted land owner, Eric Boyer-Lashuay, called to complain to the broker who had handled his lease. Northern, he recalls saying, is “a shell company … a blank door with no one behind it.”

Today, he puts it this way: “It was all a fake, all a scam.”

Northern has voided hundreds of land deals, and was indeed a facade – a shell company created so that one of America’s largest energy companies could conceal its role in the leasing spree, a Reuters investigation has found. Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy Corp., the nation’s second-largest gas driller, was behind the entire operation.

Chesapeake had created one shell company that set up another, Northern Michigan Exploration. Next, Northern hired brokers who signed leases with residents such as Boyer-Lashuay. And those brokers were under strict orders not to divulge Chesapeake’s role, records reviewed by Reuters show.

By David Sheppard and Joshua Schneyer

(Reuters) – Suncor Energy said on Wednesday it has contained a leak of an oily substance near its Commerce City refinery in Colorado that was running into Sand Creek, which joins a river that supplies Denver with water.

The Canadian energy firm said it had not yet identified the source of the leak, but acknowledged it was likely coming from its 93,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in the area. It said plant operations were unaffected.

The leak comes a month after Colorado’s Department of Public Health warned Suncor that it needed to take stricter measures to mitigate contamination that an investigation found was coming from the site and could threaten local water supplies.

Neither Suncor nor the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave an estimate on how big the leak was, which the EPA said appeared to be a petroleum product.

A spokeswoman for the company, based in Calgary, said it was not clear if there had been a leak from one of the plant’s pipelines, as reported by some media.

“Our focus is on cleanup at this point,” said Sneh Seetal, a Suncor spokeswoman at the firm’s headquarters in Calgary. “We do not see more product leaking.”

NEW YORK, Nov 30 (Reuters) – Suncor Energy said on Wednesday it has contained a leak near its Commerce City refinery in Colorado that was running into Sand Creek by the South Platte River.

The Canadian energy firm said it had not yet identified the source of the leak, and it did not identify the substance leaking, but said it believed it came from their 93,000 barrel-per-day plant.

“Our team installed booms in the creek to contain the product. That was done yesterday,” said Sneh Seetal, a Suncor spokeswoman in Calgary.

“Our focus is on cleanup at this point. We do not see more product leaking.”

The company did not say how big they believed the leak to be.

The South Platte River is a source of drinking water for the Denver metropolitan area.

The Denver Post earlier reported that federal environmental officials have been managing the spill of the as-yet-unidentified liquid since Monday.

NEW YORK, Nov 11 (Reuters) – Within hours of news that a proposed Canada to Texas pipeline won’t be built any time soon, oil traders were already betting on alternative ways to ship a glut of crude from the U.S. Midwest to the Gulf Coast.

TransCanada Corp’s $7 billion, 600,000 barrel per day (bpd) Keystone XL pipeline had been viewed as crucial to getting Canadian and North Dakota crude out of the landlocked region where surging stocks have driven the price of U.S. crude to record discounts to Europe’s benchmark Brent this year.

U.S. President Barack Obama announced this week that his administration would take at least another year to study the project and determine if it should be rerouted to avoid a Nebraska aquifer.

A decision on whether Keystone can be built was expected later this year, but the delay has pushed it back to at least 2013 — when the pipeline had been expected to come online previously.

The midcontinental crude glut has weakened West Texas Intermediate (WTI) relative to Europe’s Brent in recent years.

But instead of losing ground to Brent following Keystone XL’s delay this week, WTI has actually shot up in value against the London-traded crude, both in prompt markets and further out on the futures curve.

The move signals that traders are betting alternative alternative crude transit methods that have sprung up in recent months will fill the gap to ship crude out of the Midwest to the Gulf Coast refining center.

NEW YORK (Reuters)- For the small club of companies who trade the food, fuels and metals that keep the world running, the last decade has been sensational. Driven by the rise of Brazil, China, India and other fast-growing economies, the global commodities boom has turbocharged profits at the world’s biggest trading houses.

They form an exclusive group, whose loosely regulated members are often based in such tax havens as Switzerland. Together, they are worth over a trillion dollars in annual revenue and control more than half the world’s freely traded commodities. The top five piled up $629 billion in revenues last year, just below the global top five financial companies and more than the combined sales of leading players in tech or telecoms. Many amass speculative positions worth billions in raw goods, or hoard commodities in warehouses and super-tankers during periods of tight supply.

U.S. and European regulators are cracking down on big banks and hedge funds that speculate in raw goods, but trading firms remain largely untouched. Many are unlisted or family run, and because they trade physical goods are largely impervious to financial regulators. Outside the commodities business, many of these quiet giants who broker the world’s basic goods are little known.

Their reach is expanding. Big trading firms now own a growing number of the mines that produce many of our commodities, the ships and pipelines that carry them, and the warehouses, silos and ports where they are stored. With their connections and inside knowledge — commodities markets are mostly free of insider-trading restrictions — trading houses have become power brokers, especially in fast-developing Asia, Latin America and Africa. They are part of the food chain, yet help shape it, and the personal rewards can be huge. “The payout percentage of profits at the commodities houses can be double what Wall Street banks pay,” says George Stein of New York headhunting firm Commodity Talent.

Switzerland-based Glencore, whose initial public offering (IPO) in May put trading houses in the spotlight, pays some traders yearly bonuses in the tens of millions. On paper, the partial float made boss Ivan Glasenberg $10 billion richer overnight.

SIZE MATTERS

How big are the biggest trading houses? Put it this way: two of them, Vitol and Trafigura, sold a combined 8.1 million barrels a day of oil last year. That’s equal to the combined oil exports of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.