Citi emerged from the 2008 financial crisis with many scrapes and bruises. Since then, it has often made news for the wrong reasons: mass lay-offs, spats over executive compensation and a quarterly dividend that seems permanently stuck at one cent a share. That has not gone unnoticed by Citi energy traders. Over the past two or three years, the bank’s US power and gas desk suffered a rash of defections to Geneva-based trading firm Vitol.

Today, Citi’s global commodities group consists of about