How the crisis in the Middle East laid the foundation for our largest company

Oil trader Vitol is the largest company in the Netherlands. Two daring entrepreneurs from Rotterdam made the most of the oil crises in the 1970s. Now that the flow of oil and gas from the Middle East is once again uncertain, it is precisely these kinds of traders who are crucial to our energy supply.

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They had just bought their first load of gasoline. But how much had they actually paid for it? They didn't know. The deal was struck in a bar located under a train track, and just as the deal was being made, a train thundered by. "It's true, I still have the papers," Jacques Detiger recalled a few years ago in a short podcast.

Together with his childhood friend Henk Viëtor, he founded Vitol in 1966. This rather dubious transaction would grow into the largest company in the Netherlands. And the largest oil trader in the world. Of the more than 100 million barrels of oil produced every day, 7 million pass through the hands of the Rotterdam-based trader. That is as much as the oil production of the whole of Africa . With a turnover of $331 billion in 2024, it is even one of the 20 largest companies in the world.

In their younger years, the friends planned to travel to America together on Viëtor's father's coal ship, but Viëtor dropped out at the last minute. So Detiger went alone. After two seasick weeks on the ship, he was able to stay with family there. Without speaking English and without a visa—no paper, no job—he still managed to find a job as a buyer at Bloomingdale's clothing store. "I learned an incredible amount there," Detiger said in the podcast. 'How to run a business, how to set targets. And I learned English. When I returned to the Netherlands, I was able to joke with Americans, which other Dutch people couldn't do.'

Henk Viëtor now works for his father's company, Anker Kolen, and is sent to Germany, England, and America to learn the trade. In 1960, he makes his first oil deal there—'pure coincidence, really,' he recalls in De Telegraaf in 1982. 'A friend in the coal trade called me and asked if I could also supply gas oil. I sat down at the phone, called a German company, and they could supply it for 100 marks. I called him back and said, "I've got it. What are you offering for it?" "102," he said. "Sold," I said.'

In that article, the newspaper describes Viëtor as 'a man without any discernible emotions, sitting in a simple, tasteful executive office, dressed inconspicuously in a blue-gray suit, a Patek Philippe watch on his wrist, a gold signet ring, clearly articulating his opinions between busy phone calls with America, Italy, and England about the purchase and sale of oil shipments.'