A successful bid by US firm Defense Solutions on 7 May to buy 1m barrels of the South Sudan government’s crude was a first for the company. In recent months, most government oil contracts have been won by a small handful of traders: Glencore, Vitol, Trafigura, Sinopec subsidiary China International United Petroleum & Chemicals (Unipec), and China National United Oil Corporation (China Oil), jointly owned by China National Petroleum Corporation and Sinochem. Publicly available information on the government’s oil trades is scant, and it is even less clear how the trades are financed.