Krishna Pemsing

Krishna Pemsing has spent more than thirty years at the intersection of energy, money, and geopolitics. He has built trading companies from nothing, opened markets that others considered too difficult, and assembled the kind of banking relationships that take most careers a lifetime to develop. His base is Geneva - the centre of gravity for global commodities trading - and his network stretches from London to Moscow, from Baku to Cairo, from the Black Sea to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Know the structure before you trade it.

Krishna did not begin his career in a trading room. After completing a PhD in Structural Mechanics and a Master's in Industrial and Civil Engineering in Kiev, he joined Lloyd's Register in London - one of the world's oldest technical authorities, certifying that ships, platforms, and industrial facilities meet international safety standards. He later taught and researched at the University of Liverpool. The habit of stress-testing assumptions before committing to them became the foundation for everything that followed.

His entry into the energy world came through Baku, where he took a senior management role in joint venture operations during the early post-Soviet period - when the Caspian region was opening to international capital for the first time and the rules were still being written. It was an education available nowhere else.

From Baku, Krishna moved into Geneva's trading ecosystem, taking senior roles at Aix Commodities SA and United Petroleum Trading Switzerland SA. Across these positions he built his origination capabilities - the ability to find cargoes, match buyers and sellers, and structure transactions before any contract is signed. It is relationship work, intelligence work, and commercial judgment compressed into a single skill.

At TotalEnergies, one of the world's five largest energy companies, Krishna served as Vice President for the CIS - the bloc of former Soviet republics including Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. He opened and ran the Moscow trading office, managing relationships with producers, refiners, and exporters across the region. In a market where trust and access are built over years, not months, he built both.

He also worked at SOCAR Trading SA - the Geneva-based trading arm of Azerbaijan's state oil company - developing refining and product flow opportunities in Egypt and Bulgaria. It added further depth to a commercial geography that now spans multiple continents.

The most consequential chapter, however, is the one he built himself. As Founder and CEO of Petroforce Trading & Shipping SA, Krishna took the company from a blank page to over USD 1 billion in annual turnover in five years - a trajectory most trading businesses never achieve at all. The key was not just sourcing and placing physical cargoes of crude oil and refined products, but simultaneously building the financial architecture to support that volume. Trade finance - the letters of credit, guarantees, and structured lending facilities that allow traders to move cargo globally without tying up their own capital - requires institutional trust. Krishna secured facilities exceeding USD 400 million with leading international banks. Under his leadership, Petroforce expanded into metals and agricultural commodities.

Today, Krishna operates as a Senior Strategic Advisor, available for advisory mandates, origination assignments, board roles, and complex or distressed transactions. He holds Chartered Engineer status in the UK and a Diploma in Finance and Accounting, and works across English, French, and Russian.

Thirty years in, his most valuable asset is the simplest to describe and the hardest to acquire: he knows who to call - and they take the call.