Indian Oil Corporation is teaming up with Vitol, the world's largest independent oil trader, to launch a trading joint venture out of Singapore. Bloomberg broke the story on 29 October 2025: a 2026 launch, a five-to-seven-year initial term, exit options built in for both sides. Put that next to the fact that IOC and its unit Chennai Petroleum together control roughly 31% of India's refining capacity, and it's clear this isn't some side project to look modern. It's the country's biggest refiner walking into international trading with real money on the table.
It isn't just India, either. Over in the UAE, ADNOC's trading arm is aiming to go from around 1.2 million barrels a day to 2 million, and CEO Ahmed bin Thalith wasn't shy about why when he spoke to Bloomberg on 7 November 2025:
"We own the full value chain, from the well all the way to the distribution, and trading comes in and takes advantage of the whole operation."
Fair enough. If you already own the barrel, why leave the margin sitting on someone else's trading desk?
Here's what I find interesting, though. ADNOC didn't look inside its own ranks to run this. It went and got Benoit Roulon instead — 21 years at TotalEnergies, part of it running trading out of Singapore, then head of crude trading at Gunvor, and most recently at the hedge fund Squarepoint Capital. That's the pattern worth noticing: when a state company actually gets serious about trading, it tends to go shopping outside for someone who has already lived on a trading floor, rather than promote from within.
Why does it need an outsider? Because a state company and a trading desk are, frankly, built to do the opposite of each other. A state company is built to be careful — every big call needs sign-off from more than one desk, and every step has to survive an audit trail. A trading desk is built to be fast. Traders put real money against a live price in minutes, sometimes seconds, because the price won't sit around waiting for the next committee meeting.
Signing the joint venture is the easy bit. Running it day to day is where it gets hard. When a trading window opens and someone needs to commit a few million dollars to a spread before it closes, sitting around for approval isn't caution. It's just an expensive way of missing the trade.
So what should a board actually be looking for here? Not, in my view, a CV with thirty unbroken years inside one company — that can be a red flag as much as a credential, because it can mean someone has never once had to make a call without a safety net underneath them. What you want is someone who can speak both languages: the compliance-heavy, careful language of a state company, and the fast, numbers-first language of a trading floor. Roulon's career path — major, then independent trader, then hedge fund — is basically what that looks like on paper. And the board has to change too. Punish a smart, well-reasoned trading loss the same way you punish a compliance breach, and no good trader will ever take a real position. The whole trading arm ends up being theatre.
Building the desk itself — the Singapore office, the JV paperwork, the balance sheet behind it — is honestly the easy part. Finding, and then backing, the person who can run it at trading speed while still answering to a state-company board is the hard part. That's the real bottleneck right now. Not capital.
If you're building out that kind of commercial leadership layer, or trying to work out who could actually hold it, I'd be glad to talk it through.