Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue Corrupt Oil Baby

U.S. Government Documents Crime Spree by Dictator’s Son: Why no action by the feds?

In 2004, George W. Bush issued Presidential Proclamation 7750, which barred corrupt foreign officials from entering the United States and ordered the State Department to compile a list of banned individuals. Three years later Congress approved a complementary measure that said the State Department should take special heed to bar officials when there was “credible evidence” to believe they were involved the theft of natural resources revenues. Last July, the State Department issued a report noting that corruption eroded “confidence in democratic institutions” and that fighting it was a central tenet of American foreign policy. The report also stated that the Obama administration would “vigorously” enforce 7750, better known as the Anti-Kleptocracy Intiative, and give particularly close scrutiny to visa requests from individuals involved in corruption involving natural resources.

Why, then, is a notoriously crooked official from oil-rich Equatorial Guinea allowed to enter the country and to hold vast millions in assets here? It’s certainly not because the U.S. government is unaware of the scandalous activities of Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue. Previously undisclosed documents — obtained by London-based Global Witness and provided to Harper’s Magazine — reveal an extensive federal investigation of Obiang Mangue was underway at least two years ago. Global Witness’s report on the U.S. investigation into Obiang Mangue is available here.

Obiang Mangue, often called Teodorin, is the son and potential successor to Equatorial Guinea’s long-ruling dictator. The investigation, led by the Justice Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), identified a list of Teodorin’s American assets. They include an estate in Malibu, which sits on sixteen acres of land and boasts a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a four-hole golf course. Teodorin paid $35 million in cash for the property three years ago. He also owns a $33.8 million Gulf Stream V private jet, millions of dollars worth of sports cars, and at least two luxury boats, and has used money laundered through shell corporations to finance his American shopping sprees, according to the documents.


A Justice Department memorandum from September of 2007 noted that Teodorin’s salary as Minister of the Agriculture and Forestry paid only $5,000 per month. “[I]t is suspected that a large portion of Teodoro Nguema OBIANG’s assets have originated from extortion, theft of public funds, or other corrupt conduct,” said the document, which also detailed how between 2005 and 2007 Teodorin had funneled into the United States at least $75 million — nearly twice the amount allocated by Equatorial Guinea for its yearly national education budget.

A PowerPoint prepared by ICE’s lead investigator on the case identified the inquiry’s goals as being to “identify, trace, freeze, and recover assets within the United States illicitly acquired through kleptocracy by Teodoro Obiang and his associates,” and to “deny safe haven in the United States to kleptocrats.”

In September 2007, an American delegation met investigators in France, where Teodorin has also lived (quite well) and been the subject of law enforcement inquiry. At the meeting it was agreed that the U.S. would submit to French authorities a “commission rogatoire internationale,” or a formal request for cross-border legal assistance.

Yet two years later the investigation into Teodorin is stalled, according to two sources that spoke about the case off the record. And though the State Department will not publicly disclose the list of foreign officials barred under Bush’s Proclamation 7750, Teodorin is not on it. An official at Equatorial Guinea’s embassy in Washington, who asked to remain unidentified, said he had traveled to the United States as recently as late-September, when he helped officially inaugurate his country’s consulate in Houston.

I requested an interview with Teodorin through the embassy of Equatorial Guinea and through Qorvis, a Washington public relations and lobbying firm that works for the government, and provided a detailed account of the charges in the U.S. documents. I received no reply other than for this comment from the embassy: “We have not been contacted by any Government Agencies and are not aware of any ongoing investigation into the Government of Equatorial Guinea or any of its representatives.”

Jack Blum, an attorney and former Senate counsel who played a key role in investigations into BCCI and the Lockheed Corporation’s overseas bribery scandal, suspects that the lack of action against Teodorin may be tied to Equatorial Guinea’s energy wealth and close ties with American oil firms, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, who have major investments in the country. “The least they could do is cut off his shopping privileges by denying him entry into the United States,” he said. “Where the hell is the U.S. government?”

Teodorin’s father, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, has ruled Equatorial Guinea since 1979, when he overthrew and executed his uncle. Since taking the reins of power, Obiang has squashed political opposition and crushed dissent. He has been “elected” three times in balloting marred by fraud (in 1989 with 99 percent of the vote, in 1996 with 97.8 percent, and in 2002 with 97.1 percent).

The State Department’s 2009 global human rights survey, released in February, cited abuses in Equatorial Guinea that included “unlawful killings by security forces; government-sanctioned kidnappings; systematic torture of prisoners and detainees by security forces; life threatening conditions in prisons and detention facilities; impunity; arbitrary arrest, detention, and incommunicado detention.”

Until the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea was a pariah state with few international allies. Then American energy firms discovered vast reserves of oil and gas in the waters off Equatorial Guinea. Since then, the country has become the fourth-largest producer of crude in sub-Saharan Africa. Between 1993 and 2007, annual oil revenues shot from $3 million to $4.8 billion.
Equatorial Guinea now enjoys a per capita income of about $37,000, on par with Denmark. Yet a report released earlier this year by Human Rights Watch noted that 77 percent of the population still lives in poverty, 35 percent die before the age of 40, and 57 percent lack access to safe water. “The government of Equatorial Guinea has set new low standards of political and economic malfeasance in handling its billions of dollars in oil revenue,” the report stated. “The dictatorship…has used an oil boom to entrench and enrich itself further at the expense of the country’s people.”
The Obiang family has not been terribly discreet about its plundering of the national treasury. In 1999, Obiang bought a $2.6 million mansion in the Maryland suburbs that has 10 bathrooms and an indoor pool. The following year he bought a second Maryland property for $1.15 million. In 2008, a Spanish civil rights group filed a complaint charging that Obiang and eleven relatives and associates had used laundered money to buy homes and other real estate in the country. An official investigation into those charges is now underway.

A 2004 report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that Obiang had control over some $700 million in state funds, deposited at Riggs National Bank in Washington, D.C. by American oil companies active in Equatorial Guinea. Riggs opened multiple personal accounts for Obiang, his wife and other relatives, which held at least $13 million, and helped establish shell corporations overseas for the president. Riggs, said the report, “turned a blind eye to evidence suggesting the bank was handling the proceeds of foreign corruption, and allowed numerous suspicious transactions to take place without notifying law enforcement.” (Subsequent to the investigation, Riggs Bank paid $41 million in fines for lax oversight, a senior vice president pled guilty to fraud and money laundering, and it was bought by PNC Financial Services.) According to the report, American oil companies “contributed to corrupt practices” by entering into business ventures and making substantial payments to government officials in Equatorial Guinea.
The Obiang regime’s awful record on corruption and human rights has not prevented the United States from cozying up to it. In 2003, following an intense lobbying campaign by the oil industry, President Bush decided to reopen the American embassy in the country, which had been shut down eight years earlier for budgetary reasons and human rights violations. In 2006, Obiang met with then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who called him “a good friend” to the United States.

Teodorin has had ties to the Los Angeles area since at least 1991, when he attended an English as a Second Language course at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Elisa Wax, director of the course during that time, recalled Teodorin arriving to campus in sports cars or limousines. “He was there to party,” she said. “He rarely came to class.”
Teodorin’s tuition of $3,400 for the non-degree course included boarding at Pepperdine, but he shuttled between the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and a house he rented in Malibu. Wax received a steady stream of phone calls from the hotel as well as shops in Beverly Hills trying to track down Teodorin to settle outstanding bills. She would direct these calls to a representative at Walter International, a Houston-based firm that then had a stake in Equatorial Guinea’s offshore fields and that financed Teodorin’s “studies” at Pepperdine. The woman assigned by Walter to handle these complaints was “pulling out her hair,” Wax said. “There were people trying to locate him from all directions.”
After five months, Teodorin dropped out of the program. John Bennett, the American ambassador in Equatorial Guinea at the time, said that Walter International covered $50,000 in expenses racked up by Teodorin during his brief stay.
Teodorin has owned several estates in Los Angeles. Before purchasing his current property, he bought a house for $5.8 million in Bel Air, where he lived across the street from Farrah Fawcett. For a time he owned and operated a hip-hop label called TNO Entertainment, which produced two albums before going out of business. In an effort to woo the rapper Eve, Teodorin reportedly rented a 300-foot yacht from Microsoft founder Paul Allen for about $700,000. News accounts said Eve dated Teodorin for a time but dumped him after learning that his father had been accused of being a cannibal who ate his political rivals. (A request for comment sent to Eve’s publicist was declined.)
In France, a TV crew filmed Teodorin driving down the Champs-Elysees in a Bentley and on a shopping spree during which he bought 30 designer suits in a single afternoon. A Western businessman who had dealings with Teodorin recalled meeting him in Paris, where he was staying at the Plaza Athenee, one of the city’s most luxurious hotels. Teodorin had commandeered three of the biggest suites there—the current rate for such suites runs to thousands of dollars a night — and booked a number of other rooms for his entourage, including bodyguards and girlfriends.
Teodorin also invited this person (who asked not to be identified in this article) to a large dinner party at La Maison du Caviar. “He had a private room and he ordered a lot of champagne and so much caviar you could have scooped it with a shovel,” the source said. “All he knows is how to spend money, that’s how he measures success.”
A 2007 French police investigation uncovered tens of millions of dollars worth of assets belonging to the rulers and family members of Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and Gabon. The investigation showed that Teodorin controlled multiple accounts at blue chip banks such as Barclays, BNP Paribas, and HSBC, and that his car purchases alone had come to $6.3 million over the prior decade.
In South Africa, Teodorin bought two estates in Cape Town in 2004 for $7 million. The Times of South Africa reported that he spent millions more on renovations, including a home-theater sound system and spa baths and marble surfaces for the bathrooms. An unnamed security guard who had worked for Teodorin told the newspaper that his employer was never without a briefcase full of cash and spent thousands of dollars on champagne for his female companions.
On September 4, 2007, Stewart C. Robinson, deputy director of the criminal division at the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, sent French investigators an urgent “Request for Assistance” in an investigation of “suspected criminal conduct of Teodoro Nguema OBIANG and his associates.” It asked that “the subject of this request and the existence of a U.S. investigation on this subject be kept strictly confidential.”
In addition to Teodorin, the “targets of the investigation” were Michael Jay Berger, a Los Angeles-based attorney who “serves as an intermediary for funds wired from Equatorial Guinea,” and Somagui Forestal, a forestry company “beneficially owned by [Teodorin] from which large money transfers to the United States have originated.” Teodorin’s home in Malibu was purchased in the name of a shell corporation, Sweetwater Management, Inc., of which he is the president. His Gulfstream jet was purchased by another of Teodorin’s shell corporations, Ebony Shine International, Ltd., which is registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The U.S. investigation of Teodorin and his associates, wrote Robinson, had “identified numerous suspicious transactions”:
—In April 2005, Teodorin “was the originator on at least five separate wire transfers,” each for $5.9 million. The money moved from a bank account in Equatorial Guinea, through a French bank and then “to a correspondent account at Wachovia Corporation Atlantic to [an account] at First American Trust FSB in the name of First American Title.” Investigators believe he used those funds to purchase the mansion in Malibu.
—In April 2006, Teodorin “was the originator on three wire transfers” that moved through the same banks, except the final destination now was a Bank of America account in the name of McAfee & Taft. Through those three transfers, Teodorin moved $10.3 million into the United States.
—From May to June 2006, Teodorin and his associates executed six wire transfers from a French bank to a correspondent account at Wachovia Atlantic and then to a UBS account in New York, in the name of Insured Aircraft Title Service Correspondent. The funds, $33.8 million in all, were used by Teodorin to purchase his luxury jet.
—Between November 2006 and June 2007, the “suspected money laundering continued …through the use of an intermediary,” identified as Michael Jay Berger. He was said to be the recipient of at least four wire transfers totaling about $800,000. The evidence suggested that the wires originated from an account for Somagui Forestal bank in Equatorial Guinea and were transferred through French banks to Berger’s attorney/client trust account at Union Bank of California. (Berger declined multiple requests for comment.)
Walter Moran, then Special Agent in Charge of ICE’s Miami bureau, sent the French a PowerPoint presentation in support of the request for assistance. It said that Teodorin’s Malibu mansion was “undergoing multi-million dollar renovation,” and that he had “multiple luxury vehicles stored at the Peterson Automobile Museum in Los Angeles,” including two Rolls Royce Phantoms worth $350,000 each; two Maybachs worth $350,000 each; four Ferraris worth $250,000 each; and one Rolls Royce Park Ward.
It identified other American assets of Teodorin’s, including two speedboats of unknown value. Furthermore, two independent sources had told investigators that Teodorin was building a 200-foot custom luxury yacht, complete with a shark tank. He had also recently sought to purchase an apartment at the Ritz Carlton in New York for $20 million in cash and was looking to purchase residential property in Miami.
The PowerPoint said further that Teodorin:
—was a “Recreational drug user (3 to 4 day binges with friends).”
—frequently traveled to the United States as an A-1 diplomat, “although he is seldom on official business.”
—“allegedly received large wire transfers weekly through a ‘fictitious’ corporate account at Union Bank in California.”
—was the target of multiple Suspicious Activities Reports for suspected money laundering from financial institutions including Bank of America and Wachovia. “As a result of his activities, both banks have closed all accounts associated with Obiang and his associates,” the document said.
After being informed of the contents of the government documents, Lawrence Barcella, a former federal prosecutor, said:
“To build a case like this you have to prove that his money comes from the proceeds of corruption. That would generally require the cooperation of the foreign government in order to gather sufficient evidence, and in this case Equatorial Guinea is obviously not going to cooperate. It looks like they [prosecutors] have grounds for probable cause, which would be enough to get a warrant and an indictment, but they have to get over the hump of probable cause to beyond a reasonable doubt and that’s a lot tougher. Justice Department guidelines say you should not seek an indictment unless you believe you can meet the reasonable doubt standard.”
However, Barcella said that even if Justice could not prosecute Teodorin, the State Department could bar him from entering the country. “Traveling into the United States is not a right, it’s a gift. He could very easily be declared PNG and denied entry. For years, John Lennon couldn’t enter the United States because he smoked marijuana. You can deny a visa for any reason.”
Jack Blum shared much of Barcella’s assessment. “Gathering the evidentiary material to prove the illegal origins of [Teodorin’s] money would not be easy and [bringing a case] would turn the U.S. relationship with Equatorial Guinea on its head, and that’s of some interest given all the oil.” However, barring Teodorin from the country would be a simple matter, adding, “That is a sensible step that would have real impact, as it would put off limits to him all of his assets in the United States,” he said.
Blum believed the failure to take action against Obiang could be politically motivated. He noted that several other Justice Department cases involving oil kleptocracies — including the so-called “Kazakhgate” scandal, in which the president of Kazakhstan allegedly received tens of millions of dollars in payoffs from an American businessman representing U.S. oil companies—have been mysteriously bogged down for years. “It’s quite possible that there is high-level political interference,” he said. “As U.S. citizens, we have the right to know what’s going on here. If they are going to drop the cases, they need to lay out the facts and explain why.”
Alexandre Wrage, the president of TRACE, which advises multinational companies on compliance with anti-bribery laws, offered this comment: “To deny a visa under 7750, the State Department needs to determine that there is ‘reason to believe’ a public official has misappropriated public funds. That’s a very low standard to meet. Teodorin Obiang owns real estate and cars valued in excess of $80 million. That certainly gives me reason to believe that the funds have come from some source other than his official salary. There’s a second part to the test [of denying a visa under 7750]: has the misappropriation had serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States? Massive theft by the kleptocrats of the world undermines U.S. long-terms interests; it undermines democratization efforts and poverty alleviation, and contributes to the collapse of some states, making the world less safe. I would hope that it is this standard that applies, and not the short-term national interest of access to oil.”
Barring a coup d’etat, it is likely that President Obiang, age 67, will rule until his death and then hand off power to a chosen successor. Teodorin is widely considered to be the leading candidate to succeed him. “The guy knows how to play politics,” says Bennett, the former American ambassador. “He’s seen as the junior Big Man.”
One can argue about the legal obstacles involved in prosecuting Teodorin or seizing his assets. There is no doubt at all, though, that he is ineligible to enter the United States under 7750. Despite the U.S. government’s public commitment to keeping corrupt foreign officials out of the country, the State Department appears to be reluctant to make use of 7750. The list of those banned under the proclamation is classified, but two confidential sources I spoke to said there are only about three dozen names on it. These include, according to a few foreign press accounts and my sources, officials from Cambodia, Kenya and Nigeria.

Could the lack of action against Teodorin stem from political pressure to ignore the crimes and corruption of a possible future president of an oil-friendly ally? It’s impossible to say with certainty, and the Department of State declined comment for this article. Both the Justice Department and ICE also declined comment, saying they could not confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.
By Ken Silverstein

Rich in Oil, Poor in Human Rights

It has the makings of a modern-day fairy tale, the story of a country transformed from a pariah state into an oil paradise. But the reality is that Equatorial Guinea, almost unnoticed by the rest of the world, is experiencing a modern-day tragedy, a story of the dark niches of global politics in times of oil and terror.
After a long trip abroad, the president has just landed in Malabo, the island capital of Equatorial Guinea. It's Sunday morning, the sky is one big, dripping cloud, and two days ago the price of a barrel of crude oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $74. A good day for Equatorial Guinea.






President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is a gaunt man. He is an excellent tennis player, and those who know him -- and plan to remain in the country -- describe him as modest and likeable. Human rights organizations, on the other hand, place him on par with the likes of Uganda's Idi Amin and Cambodia's Pol Pot.

There are a few ways to be removed from the United State's list of pariah states. Regime change, negotiations and scrapping weapons and torture chambers are options, but the easiest way to be considered honorable by the United States is to discover oil. Lots of oil. After all, everyone wants to drive.

Obiang gets into his bulletproof limousine. A former lieutenant colonel, he is now 64 and the condition of his prostate compels him to make frequent visits to the Mayo Clinic across the Atlantic. The hospitals in his country aren't nearly as good. In fact, they aren't really recognizable as hospitals.

Equatorial Guinea now has the highest per capita income, adjusted for purchasing power, in Africa. No other economy in the world has experienced 30 percent average annual growth in the last five years. The country has fewer inhabitants than the German city of Düsseldorf, but each year it collects several hundred million dollars in revenues from oil companies. "Unfortunately," writes the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its country report, "this wealth has not even led to a measurable improvement in living conditions."

So where is the money going?

President Teodoro Obiang gazes out through the darkened windows of his limousine. The four-lane "Carretera del Aeropuerto" is closed to regular traffic, which normally happens only when the president's son, Teodorín, wants to take his Ferrari for a spin. New warehouses and residential areas for the country's new foreign residents line the highway.

One only has to see the billboards lining the road -- for international energy conglomerates like Schlumberger, Exxon, Bouygues and Marathon -- to realize that an oil boom is taking place in this small West African country. According to one billboard, Chevron is "pleased to be working in the Republic of Equatorial Guinea again." They're all here to do business with Obiang, and at $74 a barrel, he no longer has to answer certain questions.

Most people have never heard of Equatorial Guinea. Into the 1990s, this malaria-infested postage stamp of a country in the neck of Africa was best know for gorillas, giant frogs and the ten-foot-long, deadly Green Mamba snake. In the past, slave cargos were stored here en route to America's plantations.

The country gained a drop of notoriety in the Nicole Kidman film, "The Interpreter," and in Frederick Forsyth's mercenary thriller, "The Dogs of War." In both the film and the bestseller, the country is portrayed as a miserable republic of torture, one with which nobody would want to have any relations if it weren't for its raw materials, an obscure pariah state that really couldn't exist, except in the heads of imaginative writers. Forsyth, considered an excellent observer, wrote his book in the Hotel Bahía on Malabo's harbor.

Malabo is the world's only capital that has no daily newspaper, no newspaper stands and not a single bookstore. The only book available for purchase is displayed in the supermarket. It's called "Practical Handbook of Ceremony" -- a behavioral guide for potentates and those who aspire to be like them.

Former US President Bill Clinton ordered the US embassy in Malabo shut down, because he believed that his ambassador wasn't safe there. That was in the spring of 1995. Only a few weeks later, geologists working for Mobil discovered an oil field, now called the "Zafiro field," only 20 minutes by helicopter from Malabo. It promised to be huge, to the tune of up to 1.2 billion barrels.

Since then, the only powerful adversary President Teodoro Obiang has to fear is his prostate.
The president's motorcade consists of at least two dozen vehicles, each filled with bodyguards, soldiers and automatic weapons, almost as if Obiang were planning to fight a small war. He obtained his bodyguards in Morocco -- at a high price. The president knows that some people can never be completely trusted. In order to take over power, he had his uncle shot and killed.

It happened in 1979, when Obiang's uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, known as "Papa Macías," embarked on a wave of executions that also extended to close relatives. After the country gained its independence from Spain in 1968, Papa Macías began having his troops slaughter the Bubi, an ethnic minority, drove a third of the country's population into exile, murdered 65,000 citizens -- and called the whole thing "socialism."

The only countries supporting Equatorial Guinea in those years were Cuba, China, the Soviet Union and France. The country was later admitted to the International Organization of Francophone States.

Papa Macías shocked diplomats with his outrageous statements, including his claim that Adolf Hitler was "Africa's savior." The use of the world "intellectuals" was made punishable by law. Macías would celebrate his birthdays by having prisoners shot by a firing squad in Malabo's stadium, while loudspeakers played his favorite song, "Those Were the Days." In this staunchly Catholic country, he once had political opponents crucified.

Before Teodoro Obiang had his despotic uncle shot, he was the director of the notorious "Black Beach Prison," a place known for its torture practices. Now that he is president and is being driven through Malabo, he says he is tired of constantly having to listen to these old stories. After all, the US Secretary of State called him "a good friend" at a reception in Washington on April 12. The higher the price of crude oil in New York, the stronger that friendship seems to get.

The president's motorcade passes the fenced grounds of Exxon's local headquarters building, followed by the powerful Chinese embassy. China is important. It's always a good idea to have several friends, especially when they buy up every drop of oil the country has to offer and do little more than smile and nod when they're told that a state in Africa should be dealt with more sternly than countries elsewhere.

Especially Equatorial Guinea. After all, Obiang was the one who organized the country's first elections and permitted political parties, even for the Bubi. Of course, most party leaders could be bought. Others couldn't understand why one shouldn't criticize a government, and were sent to prison to think about it. "What right does the opposition have to criticize the actions of a government?" the president asked. Severo Moto, an opposition leader who fled the country, was recently sentenced in absentia to 100 years in prison.

Obiang was reelected by almost 100 percent of voters in the last election, a little less than four years ago. Some election precincts even managed to count 103 percent of voters in support of the incumbent candidate, setting what could well be a democratic record.

At the gas station, the motorcade turns left toward the old port. It passes the governing party's headquarters and then a memorial honoring Cuba -- and then something happens.

Someone is standing in the road, a foreign woman holding a camera. She is an American, and she has a photography permit in her bag, a permit for which she paid a $30 fee at the Ministry of Tourism, housed in a crumbling colonial building. The other $70 must have been some sort of tax on white people.

Under government decree number 42, tourists are permitted to take pictures. But there are no tourists in Malabo. No one takes pictures here.

Especially not of the president.

The motorcade speeds up and disappears past guard dogs and behind the gates of the old governor's palace.

But the last vehicle, a military jeep, screeches to a halt, turns to the side and stops in front of the American woman. An officer jumps out, wielding an automatic weapon. The American smiles, but the officer doesn't.

The American puts up a spirited fight that consists of hysterical screams, a great deal of arm-waving and, finally, tears. The soldiers carry automatic pistols. The woman is thrown into the back of the Jeep, searched and, finally, left standing in the road, pale and sobbing. She will leave the country on the next flight.

"It was very reckless of that woman. It was very stupid. The president is quite touchy when he sees cameras." Brigadier General Manuel Nguema Mba, minister of national security, is a friendly man with bad teeth and an easy, guffawing laugh. He is the man to whom human rights organization Amnesty International addresses all of its appeals. According to reports by the United Nations Commission for Human Rights, the minister has been known to supervise the torture of political enemies. The government in Malabo believes that torturing prisoners is not a violation of human rights, because prisoners have no rights.



The US government for many years listed the regime as a junta that uses torture to maintain its grip on power. Indeed, it was only after Sept. 11, 2001 that Equatorial Guinea was suddenly transformed from a pariah state into a key element in the new American oil strategy. A few months after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Walter Kansteiner, assistant secretary of state for African Affairs in the Bush administration, called together a meeting of oil barons: "Bring that oil home." He was talking about African oil, and "home," in his view, wasn't Malabo.

The Americans hope that the Gulf of Guinea will make them less dependent on the Persian Gulf. They want to be able to fill up their SUVs in Idaho without having the uncomfortable feeling that they may be enriching their political enemies.


The Kuwait of Africa


Until Sept. 11, US President George W. Bush treated Africa as a sort of global Bronx -- incorrigibly poor, black and full of disgusting epidemics. But then his advisors placed a set of reports on his desk describing Malabo as the "Kuwait of Africa."

In the spring of 2002, the pro-administration African Oil Policy Initiative Group described the region as being of "vital interest" to the United States and recommended establishing a military base there.

Robert Murphy of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence summarized the greatest advantage of African oil for the United States thusly: "Much of the oil in West Africa is offshore, which separates it from domestic political or social unrest." What he meant was that the oil can be shipped directly overseas without having to pass through complicated canals and deltas, and without the risk of pipelines being blown up by some liberation group.

President Bush had breakfast with Teodoro Obiang in 2002. There is a photograph of the meeting, which Obiang would have liked to take home. But the people at National Security refused to release it. The West African leader's government was still too unsavory for the Bush administration to openly declare it an ally.

The State Department's files contained information about the "Black Beach parties" Obiang had organized during the Macías era. Prodded with red-hot iron bars, prisoners were forced to dance around a fire for hours, singing songs of praise to the dictator.

But now the Bush administration was caught up in its new "War on Terror." Against the objections of human rights groups, Bush promised to reopen the US embassy in Malabo soon.

A Voice of America relay station on São Tomé was upgraded, enabling the broadcaster to cover large sections of Africa. The US now plans to build a military base on the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe to protect the oil in this new and better gulf.

Meanwhile, drilling platforms protrude like claims in the gulf off the coast of Malabo. Exxon, Amerada Hess (Triton), Chevron, Marathon. Licenses have been issued almost exclusively to US companies. The Bush administration's oil connections are legendary. The former CEO of Triton once made George W. a multimillionaire by selling him the Texas Rangers. Former President George H.W. Bush's ambassador in Malabo later worked as a consultant to Ocean Energy.

According to a ranking compiled by Transparency International, Equatorial Guinea is one of the world's seven most corrupt nations. The country's confidence index is so low it's barely detectable.

This isn’t contradicted by the fact that oil companies, when interviewed, emphasize their cooperative relationships with the Obiang government.

A 2004 US Senate report on money laundering revealed details of the oil business in Malabo. According to the report, oil companies have paid portions of Equatorial Guinea's share of the proceeds directly to the president's family. At one time, the balance in Obiang's accounts with Riggs Bank in Washington amounted to $700 million.

An investigation was launched into possible violations of laws against money laundering. Riggs paid $25 million in fines.

According to the IMF, oil revenues are now being paid into accounts at the Central Bank of Central African States. There are also overseas accounts controlled entirely by the president.

The Riggs exposure was unpleasant, forcing the oil companies to put their PR machinery into action. Lobbyists and law firms were paid to improve President Obiang's image. Exxon sent truckloads of medications into Equatorial Guinea's villages. Energy conglomerate Marathon launched a program to spray every house on the island with insecticide to bring down the mosquito population. The four companies' increased their expenditures for "charity" to an estimated $20 million. That's a lot of money. About a quarter of one percent of their entire investment.

By 2015 the United States expects to derive 25 percent of its oil imports from sub-Saharan Africa, which would surpass imports from the Persian Gulf.

With estimated reserves of 1.77 billion barrels of oil, Equatorial Guinea currently produces 403,000 barrels a day. The country has the largest oil reserves per capita in sub-Saharan Africa.

In the past few years, "Equatorial Guinea" -- essentially the private property of President Obiang -- collected 20 to 35 percent of the foreign oil companies' revenues. This is low compared to Nigeria and Angola. But sometimes it's a good idea not to ask for too much. Especially when you are the president of a small country with poor, but powerful neighbors.

The oil is pumped from wells at depths of up to 1,300 meters (4,265 feet) and processed at sea. Natural gas is taken to Malabo, where it is liquefied. Plans are on the table to develop Equatorial Guinea into an Atlantic hub in the natural gas business. Marathon has just completed a $1.4 billion natural gas liquefaction facility. British Gas has bought up Marathon's entire supply of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for the next 17 years, and is having two tankers built in South Korea solely for the purpose of transporting the LNG. Starting next year the lion's share, 3.4 million tons, will be shipped to Lake Charles, Louisiana. It's a well-traveled route. Some of the towns in Louisiana's Mississippi delta still have African names. This is where the slaves landed, the slaves of Malabo.

"We don't photograph the president's car. This is Malabo, not Washington, DC," says the minister. In Togo, a mercenary once detonated a bomb with a remote control device hidden in a camera. The word gets around among the powerful in the region.

The minister wears long, pointy shoes made of crocodile leather. There is something unpleasant about them. "Well, let's not talk about that anymore. The matter is settled. How do you like my hotel?"

Minister Mba has crushed several attempts to overthrow the president. As a reward, he was permitted to build a residential complex along the Carretera del Aeropuerto, complete with offices, a surprisingly expensive hotel and around-the-clock security.

The complex is called Paraíso. "The name was my idea," says the minister. Then his telephone rings and he disappears into the next room without saying a word. Anyone who wants to make money in Malabo these days checks into the Paraíso. The air in the lobby is chilled and saturated with smoke. A game of Britain's professional football Premier League is playing on a flat screen TV. A group of Israeli military advisors, a representative of a company that makes patrol boats and James "Jaydee" Dale are all sitting in armchairs in the lobby.

Dale is a retired Coast Guard general, a good-natured, red-faced man from the US South who represents an outfit called MPRI. MPRI is one of the largest private military agencies, and it generally operates in places where the Pentagon prefers to remain under the radar. This is MPRI's motto: If you work for pig farmers, you have to go to places where it stinks.

That was what brought Dale to Malabo.

"If you pick a fight with the president, you can forget about the rules," he says. MPRI has worked for the Pentagon in the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. The State Department has hired Dale and his staff to spend a year training the country's coast guard to protect the drilling platforms.

Dale is too well paid to provide more detailed information. His boss, on the other hand, once said this about the Obiang regime: "They do have a poor human rights record, but so did the Nazi government, and we did pretty well with Germany after World War II."

Washington's policy is not to send official military advisors to Malabo, but rather to leave the job to private firms. The US calls this approach a "low profile" policy. Its new embassy is an unassuming residential building on the road to the airport with a chicken strolling in the yard. There are no marines, only two local guards and a simple sign on the door that reads "US Embassy Equatorial Guinea." The consular officer, Maureen McGovern, is so inconspicuous that she is sometimes mistaken for a nanny at receptions.

It's a low-key presence. The rent for the building is paid directly to the owner. He is the Minister of National Security -- the man with the crocodile leather shoes.

The crowd of discreet military advisors and representatives of weapons firms at the Hotel Paraíso has a lot to do with the high price of oil, with terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and with an aging Boeing 727 that was stopped in March 2004 during a stopover in Harare, Zimbabwe. The plane was filled with bolt cutters, pepper spray, sledgehammers and mercenaries -- and it was on its way to Malabo.

The tip had come from South Africa. An advance commando was already waiting in Malabo. Oddly enough, one of the financial backers of the venture had the same last name as the former British prime minister. Even more oddly, the man was indeed Mark Thatcher.

"It was a lousy attempt to overthrow Obiang to get at his money," a German diplomat in Berlin said. "Apparently they based their preparations entirely on the book by Forsyth. They even copied the code name."

Margaret Thatcher paid £165,000 ($313,062) in bail to secure the release of her idolized son. The other mercenaries were sentenced and recently released, with the exception of a German named Gerhard Merz, who died at "Black Beach" after being held for only a few days.

Minister Manuel Mba held the opposition leader, in exile in Spain, responsible for the coup attempt and demanded his immediate extradition. Others believe to this day that the coup was staged as an excuse to reallocate drilling rights.

In return for his role in averting the coup, an icon of the fight against apartheid, South African businessman Tokyo Sexwale, was promised oil fields in section R, an area that had previously been reserved for French oil company Total.


Oilmen sit around tables covered with empty beer bottles at the Hotel Paraíso late into the evening. Later, during karaoke, one of them jumps, fully clothed, into the pool. They come from northern England, Croatia, Houston and the Philippines.

"I have two lives," says Mark, a drilling engineer with Marathon, accompanied by a girl with melancholy eyes. He's used his oil earnings to buy a farm in Yorkshire, complete with horses for his two daughters and surrounded by a hedge where blackbirds make their nests.

In Malabo, he always has a girl from Cameroon in his room, swallows large amounts of high-dosage malaria pills and spends three-month, seven-day a week, around-the-clock shifts working on a drilling platform. He says: "I have trouble explaining life here to people at home."

Most of Marathon's men are taken directly from the airport to the company-owned complex on the Punta Europa peninsula, a sort of high-security Green Zone in the rainforest, complete with Wi-Fi Internet access, signs that read "Speed Limit 25 KPH" and air-conditioned bungalows with local phone service for calls to Houston.

Four thousand people live here, including about 1,000 Americans. Marathon bought the roughly 120-acre site directly from the president. It has its own water and power system, hospitals and supermarkets. The oil people call the complex "Pleasantville."

Despite the comforts here, everyone counts the days before boarding the "Houston Express," a direct flight home. Hardly anyone ever sets foot in downtown Malabo, only a few kilometers away.

Malabo sits like a bead of sweat above its harbor, a lethargic collection of colonial buildings, homemade-looking shacks, "rendezvous" bars and the ostentatious new houses of the kleptocracy. The city appears to be crawling toward its future at a snail's pace. Of its population of 50,000, there are no beggars and no smiles.

Only 15 years ago, Malabo's telephone book consisted of two pages, with listings by first name only. The city's only hotel had no water, no power and no kitchen. Cars were rare and asphalt was unknown.

Nowadays Toyotas are even parked in front of slum huts, and mobile phones outnumber inhabitants. But the city still lacks running water. Various sanitation projects have been initiated, paid for with foreign aid and then canceled without any visible results.

There is some construction underway in the city's old section, the Spanish quarter. Practically everything built in Malabo belongs to the Obiang clan. The standard response to "Who is building this hotel?" is "the president." And the owner of this fantastically elegant apartment building? "Hassan, the president's youngest son." And who has mechanics flown in from Maranello to service his Ferraris? "Teodoríno, the president's son and minister of agriculture."

Power and arrogance are reflected in the stretch SUVs parked at odd angles, in the facades of air-conditioned office buildings, in the mirrored sunglasses of police officers and in their whips made of power cables, which they use to drive passengers onto the ferry.

One of the few Europeans who feels comfortable in Malabo is Jean-Louis Ecard, a native of the French region of Burgundy. He has been through four marriages that are more or less over, prides himself on his resemblance to the late Anthony Quinn and runs the Le Bourguignon restaurant in the French cultural center. "Poverty? Don't be fooled," he says. "The people live in filth, but they have cars in front of their houses. There are more mobile phones than residents here. Hey!" A brown rat rushes past and a waiter kicks it against a wall. "This is Malabo. It has nothing in common with the rest of Africa. Have you seen anyone smiling here? You see? They don't like foreigners. The whites are thieves, missionaries or some other form of insult, and immigrants are despised and beaten."

Ecard has lived in Malabo long enough to be qualified to say things like: "The people here are not ready for democracy. The Europeans should take a page from the Americans' book. They know what they're doing. All they want is their oil, not their souls."

Ecard is an eccentric. Hardly anyone speaks freely in Malabo, not as long as there is Black Beach prison and its torture chambers. Some oil company employees have already been flown out quickly for voicing criticism of the regime. Even Pleasantville has ears. And even behind the wall of a monastery above the harbor, the head monk closes the door before he speaks, saying that he has had to bail out too many priests from Black Beach. "Those who tell the truth end up in jail." He talks about plane crashes that no one is allowed to discuss, and about Annabón Island, where the government is burying nuclear waste in return for a lot of money.

"There was a cholera epidemic last year. We had to read masses day and night and bury the dead. The government still denies that there was even an epidemic. It turned down Spain's offer of assistance."

The monk says: "Wealth has descended on the country like a pestilence, and it's stifling the local economy. Values no longer exist. Everyone who is part of it feels important. No one wants to learn. All they want are the oil dollars."

The "water tank principle"

It's a phenomenon economists call the " curse of raw materials." Why work when money is bubbling out of the ground? Entire cities disintegrate into lethargy, agriculture and the trades fall into decline and society turns into an amalgam of oil pensioners, petroleum profiteurs and beneficiaries. Immigrants do the work. Society becomes a bourgeoisie that's at the mercy of the crude oil price, passively watching as oil tankers sail westward along the horizon. Just as it is in Kuwait.

And as it is in Kuwait, Malabo's supermarkets already sell eggs imported from Holland and meat imported from Spain. The country's mainland has its own sources of mineral water, and yet mineral water is imported from Portugal.

Obiang promised to cooperate with the World Bank, and he replaced a few of his relatives in government posts with technocrats. But the capital Malabo still has no running water, no reliable power supply and no healthcare system worth mentioning. The Economist writes in its current country report that "there appears to be no sign that Mr. Obiang has any real interest in economic reforms beyond rhetoric and cultivating his image."

The IMF has recommended that Obiang establish a resource fund based on models in Botswana and Norway. The country's oil dollars would be deposited into the fund and distributed based on sensible decisions. But that would require the software of a modern state. It would require functioning ministries, legal certainty and transparency. None of these things exist in Manabo. Instead, the economy is based on what could be termed a water tank principle. The coffers of the powerful and their extended families are already filled to overflowing. Water now reaches the middle classes, and the first drops are already trickling to the bottom. There are even cars parked in the slums. They are little more than molecules in the country's flood of wealth, but this seems sufficient to keep the people in check. Hope is the strongest weapon of repression.

There is no opposition of any consequence. Severo Moto, the chairman of the Progress Party who fled the country, is now in Madrid and is forced to look on as Teodoro Obiang is received with full honors by the European Commission.

At night, the Punta Europe peninsula and its modern facilities sticks out like an orange, constantly humming spaceship amidst the banyan trees. The man with the graying temples comes from Houston. He has attended countless top meetings at Marathon and Exxon. The man likes his job, which explains why he doesn't want to reveal his name.

He says: "This is the shit-hole of the planet. Our bosses hate the corruption, they hate these guys and most of all they hate the protocol. They're oil titans who have more people working for them than this place has residents. They fly in from Houston in their Lear jets. When they get here, they meet with a minister who decides to cancel the negotiations if anyone dares to sit down before he does or neglects to call him Excelentíssimo."

There are the loud, backslapping Texans, accustomed to rough talk and country music clubs. And then there are the military men wearing the outfits of cabinet ministers, the formerly colonized who think in terms of the Fang and the Bubi tribes, trapped in a web of paternal and maternal lines.

But that's the deal. What the Texans want is to be left alone while they extract as many resources as possible from the ocean floor off Malabo between now and 2032, and then they want to get out as quickly as possible. In return, the regime wants 25 cents on the dollar and the guarantee that it will be left alone: no coup, no intervention, no excessive talk of human rights. And at some point, the president wants that photo with George W. Bush.

Money is the issue here, not souls. There may be some mention of cooperation with local officials in the Marathon and Exxon business reports. But the superficial friendliness masks a different tone altogether. "The Texans know, of course, that their business partner sitting across the table is no 'Excellency,' but in truth a 'son of a bitch.' Deep in their hearts, they despise themselves. Both sides despise themselves. And each side knows that this is true of the other."

It doesn't fit together. Those on one side of the equation are from the slave island, and those on the other are the descendants of plantation owners. Master and slave. Black and white. Water and oil.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
URL:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,434691,00.html
FORUM:
Will the fight for resources result in a new Cold War?
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RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
The New Cold War: The Global Battle for Natural Resources
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,k-6954,00.html
Investing in Ethics: The Norwegian Model (08/31/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,426733,00.html
Too Much of a Good Thing: The Curse of Natural Resources (08/30/2006)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,426730,00.html

Angola: Nation Enhances Profile With Rising Reserves

Angola's contention for the position of Africa's leading petroleum resource producer gained more points weekend when the country's reserves capacity received a boost with a deepwater hit.

French multinational major, Total, announced that its subsidiary TEPA Ltd. and Sociedade Nacional de Combustíveis de Angola (Sonangol EP), made an oil discovery on block 17/06, in the deep waters of the Angolan offshore.

Total declared that Gardenia-1 drilled in a water depth of 977 meters to encounter the find, making it the first well and the first discovery made on Block 17/06.

The company stated in a declaration that the well discovered hydrocarbon reservoirs, both in the Miocene and the Oligocene, adding that the well produced 4,000 bpd on the Miocene interval. Output from the well, it said, was of 25 API° oil during tests.

The company said this first discovery of Gardenia-1 confirms the potential of the north-western part of Block 17/06 and further drilling on the block will start on the Q4.

Sonangol E.P. is the concessionary of Block 17/06. TEPA (Block 17/06) Limited is the operator with a 30 percent stake.

The other partners on Block 17/06 are Sonangol Pesquisa e Produção, S.A. (30 percent), SSI Seventeen Limited (27.5 percent), ACREP Bloco 17 S.A. (5 percent), Falcon Oil Holding Angola, S.A. (5 percent) and PARTEX Oil and Gas (Holdings) Corporation (2.5 percent).

The discovery has added more attraction to the Angolan status as a leading source of crude oil in Africa, racing closely after Nigeria in the race for the continent's prime destination for petroleum investments.

Angola which currently holds the presidency of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and will host the next meeting of the oil exporters' group had at several times in the last two years topped export chart from Africa as security tension force huge volumes of shut in Nigeria.

Angola's rising hydrocarbon reserves and production recommended its entry into the OPEC at time when production from Indonesia was fast declining, making the coincidence a perfect replacement to retain the organization's membership size after withdrawal of the Asian producer.

Indonesia whose status as an oil producer suddenly changed to that of net oil importer pulled out from the group following sharp decline in reserves and output. At the same time, Angola which was smarting from protracted internal civil war launched intense exploration and production of oil as means of generating revenue to fund economic recovery.

Multinational players whose operations in Nigeria are fraught with community crises and alterations in fiscal arrangements find Angola as new investment haven, making frantic efforts to grab acreages for exploration.

The attention on Angola also carried with it huge investment portfolios which have resulted in recent exploration successes that guarantee further investments development and production.
Sopuruchi Onwuka
28 October 2009

Copyright © 2009 Daily Champion. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).

Anadarko Makes West Africa Find: Oil Alert

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Oil inventory metrics will be in full view today, but it was news of a big oil find in Africa that stirred many reports in the early going.

On Wednesday morning, Anadarko Petroleum(APC Quote) announced the finding of a huge, new oil system off the coast of Sierra Leone. The Venus site, as it's called, was drilled to about 18,500 feet deep in 5,900 feet of water, encountering more than 45 net feet of hydrocarbon pay, according to Anadarko's press release.

Including the Jubilee site in the east off the coast of Ghana, the two sites create "bookends spanning approximately 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) across two of the most exciting and highly prospective basins in the world," Anadarko senior vice president Bob Daniels said in the press release.

Anadarko has a 40% interest in Venus, leaving Australia-based Woodside, U.K. concern Tullow and integrated Spanish player Repsol(REP Quote) with 25%, 25% and 10% interests, respectively.

Anadarko shares were adding $2.85, or 4.8%, at $62.02 before the opening bell, while Repsol's American depositary shares were gaining 31 cents, or 1.2%, at $27.34.

But that came on the heels of some surprising U.S. inventory news. The industry's American Petroleum Institute reported yesterday afternoon that crude inventories jumped by 631,000 barrels last week. Analysts surveyed by Platts expected oil stocks to show a 3 million barrel drop.

The same report also showed a huge jump in gasoline and U.S. distillate inventories, which swelled by 1.3 million barrels and 5.2 million barrels each.

Later on Wednesday morning, the Energy Department will release its own oil inventory figures.

During electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Wednesday, front-month crude was trading lower by 27 cents at $70.66. On Tuesday, the October delivery contract gained $2.07 to settle at $70.93.

Shares of Exxon Mobil(XOM Quote) slid 51 cents to close at $69.49 on Tuesday. But shares were climbing 34 cents during per-market trading on Wednesday.

ConocoPhillips(COP Quote) and Chevron(CVX Quote) were also moving higher by 0.8% and 1.2% each before the opening bell.

-- Written by Sung Moss in New York

Fresh Uganda oil find ‘Africa’s biggest’

From The Times January 14, 2009

Robin Pagnamenta Heritage Oil announced details of a large oil discovery in Uganda yesterday, which the company claimed could be the largest onshore discovery in sub-Saharan Africa.

Heritage said that its latest discovery – Giraffe1 – in the Lake Albert region, could total at least 400 million barrels of oil.

However, Paul Atherton, chief financial officer, told The Times that the wider field it was developing, dubbed Buffalo-Giraffe, had several “billions of barrels of oil in place”, although it was unclear how much of this would be recoverable.

He said that the field, which is 9,000 square kilometers in size – or six times the size of Greater London – was unquestionably the largest onshore discovery made in sub-Saharan Africa in at least 20 years, possibly ever.

Mr Atherton said that of the 18 wells the company had drilled in the basin so far, all had produced oil. “Clearly the entire basin is full of oil,” he said. “It’s a world-class discovery, the most exciting new basin in Africa in decades.”

Previously, the largest onshore fields discovered in sub-Saharan Africa were at Rabi-Kounga in Gabon, where 900 million barrels were found in 1985, and at Kome in Chad, where 485 million barrels were found in 1977.

Mr Atherton said that it would take at least another three years to start commercial production. The crude could be exported by road or rail, he said, but analysts believe that the most practical solution would be to build an 806-mile pipeline to take it to Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and then the Kenyan coast. The pipeline would need to be heated and designed to traverse swampy and mountainous land. It would cost an estimated $1.5 billion (£1 billion) to complete.

Heritage and its partner Tullow Oil, which also has a 50 per cent equity stake in the project, would need to demonstrate that the field could produce at least 400 million barrels of oil to justify the cost of building such a pipeline. Richard Griffith, an Evolution Securities analyst, said the latest discovery “thrashed” this commerciality threshold.




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Guinea: Oil Wealth Draws Mercenaries & Misery

The BBC reports on 64 British mercenaries who allegedly plotted to overthrow the oil-rich government of dirt-poor Guinea. “In 2004 [Guinea] had the world's fastest-growing economy. It might not be reflected in the life of the average citizen -- but it was enough to attract the attention of people with plans for a coup,” the BBC reports. The takeover failed, but democracy in Guinea is as fragile as ever.

After a lunge towards accountability inspired by public uprisings over the past two years, Guinea appears to be losing ground in its battle for a more democratic government. According to a new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), there are few signs that life in Guinea is improving for the average citizen despite the discovery of large oil reserves -- a find that has attracted large scale international investment. The few concrete results of President Conte's appeasement tactics following the 2007 union strikes are quietly being revoked. Most prominently and recently, in May 2008, Prime Minister Lansana Kouyate was dismissed and replaced by Tidiane Souare -- a close ally of President Lansana Conte who is unlikely to help Guineans benefit more from Guinea’s economic success. Without clear divisions between the Presidential and Prime Minister positions, democratic reform and budget transparency seems unlikely. Corruption, on the other hand, is certainly a possibility. Meanwhile, ICG indicates the credibility of the much-awaited December 2008 legislative elections is already being undermined.
The Prime Minister position of Guinea is no longer a fulcrum of popular will as it was once hoped to be. Once there is no one to keep Conte accountable to the public, Guinea seems headed firmly back toward dictatorship. The divide between resource wealth and common poverty is profound, and highly visible. Without efforts to distribute this wealth, the people of Guinea may again turn to striking and there is a real possibility of violence.

Intervention points are few, but aid agencies may play a role. The International Crisis Group recommends, “Direct assistance to the government should be made conditional on the organization of legislative elections in December 2008 and the provision of financial and logistic support and security measures necessary to launch the independent commission of inquiry into the events of June 2006 and January-February 2007.”

-- by Lacy Clark --

-- image by Jon & Mel Kots (CC) --

Chevrons Actions Ugly Capitalism

Wanna hear a pulp hypocrisy story? Bush Administration comdemned the violent crackdown in Burma. Not only George W. Bush and the First Lady, but also Condoleezza Rice made very “strong” statements against the junta’s latest actions in Yangon. Now, let’s recall who on earth has been the biggest supporter of the Burmese regime? Clue: A multinational oil corp. Amy Goodman helps our memory in her article on Truthdig. Let’s read on about multinationals, globalism, neocons, Chevron and slave labor:
The Bush administration is making headlines with its strong language against the Burmese regime. President Bush declared increased sanctions in his U.N. General Assembly speech. First lady Laura Bush has come out with perhaps the strongest statements. Explaining that she has a cousin who is a Burma activist, Laura Bush said, “The deplorable acts of violence being perpetrated against Buddhist monks and peaceful Burmese demonstrators shame the military regime.”Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said, “The United States is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place.” Keeping an international focus is essential, but should not distract from one of the most powerful supporters of the junta, one that is much closer to home. Rice knows it well: Chevron.Fueling the military junta that has ruled for decades are Burma’s natural gas reserves, controlled by the Burmese regime in partnership with the U.S. multinational oil giant Chevron, the French oil company Total and a Thai oil firm. Offshore natural gas facilities deliver their extracted gas to Thailand through Burma’s Yadana pipeline. The pipeline was built with slave labor, forced into servitude by the Burmese military.Rice served on the Chevron board of directors for a decade. She even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. While she served on the board, Chevron was sued for involvement in the killing of nonviolent protesters in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Like the Burmese, Nigerians suffer political repression and pollution where oil and gas are extracted and they live in dire poverty. The protests in Burma were actually triggered by a government-imposed increase in fuel prices.

Goodman writes about the “lifeline of the Burmese regime”. Recommended for refreshing memories and diagnosing the hypocrisy of the neocons. Oil companies have all the blood stains of the innocent people on their hands. As usual.




Burma: a brief political history
A chronology of Burma's constitutional affairs since its independence.

- July 1947:General Aung San, Suu Kyi's father and the architect of Burma's independence from Britain, is assassinated in Rangoon along with six members of his pre-independence cabinet.
- Jan 1948: The Union of Burma declares independence, with a new charter establishing a bicameral parliament.
- March 1962: General Ne Win launches a military coup, discarding the constitution and setting up a Revolutionary Council of military leaders who rule by decree.
- March 1974: A new constitution transfers power from the armed forces to a People's Assembly of former military leaders headed by Ne Win. It allows for a unicameral legislature and one legal political party. Ne Win becomes president.
- 1988: Ne Win resigns and decades of economic strife and ethnic tensions boil over into riots. The military takes power under the name the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), annuling the constitution.
- May 1990: The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi wins 392 of 485 seats in the first multi-party general election since 1960.
- June 1990: SLORC chief Saw Maung rules out a quick transfer of power, saying a new constitution is needed first.
- 1991: Suu Kyi is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, while under house arrest.
- 1992: General Than Shwe becomes head of the junta and prime minister and plans for a new constitution are announced.
- Jan 1993: A National Convention on a new constitution is abruptly adjourned, after delegates oppose a clause stating the military must have the leading political role.
- Nov 1995: Convention reconvenes. NLD pulls out, saying the process does not represent the will of the people.
- June 1996: The government hints the NLD may be outlawed, Suu Kyi says her party plans to draft a separate constitution.
- June 1996: A new law declares the unauthorised drafting of a constitution is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
- July 1997: Burma's foreign minister says a new constitution is being finalised, a week after the country joins the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).
- Nov 1997: SLORC changes its name to the State Peace and Development Council. The 19-member SPDC includes former SLORC chairman Than Shwe and intelligence chief Khin Nyunt.
- Aug 2003: Prime minister Khin Nyunt announces a "roadmap to democracy", but gives no firm timetable.
- May 2004: National Convention reconvenes without the NLD, which boycotts talks while Suu Kyi is under house arrest. Convention adjourns for monsoon break.
- Feb 2005: Convention resumes with Suu Kyi still under house arrest. Talks end in January 2006 with no clear progress.
- Oct 2006: Talks resume, NLD boycotts, talks adjourn in late December.
- July 2007: Convention reopens for the last time.
- Sept 2007: Convention completes work after 14 years working out the broad outline of a "disciplined" democracy.
- Oct 2007: Junta appoints 54-member commission, mostly military officers and civil servants, to draft constitution.
- Aug-Sept, 2007: Monks lead mass demonstrations in cities across Burma to demand that the government lower fuel costs and release political activists.
The protests last more than 10 days before the soldiers turned violent, beating and shooting the monks and their civilian supporters.
Hundreds are feared to have been killed, although the military junta says only 13 people died.
- Feb 2008: Junta announces referendum on new constitution in May, followed by multi-party elections in 2010.
- April 2008 - Government publishes proposed new constitution, which allocates a quarter of seats in parliament to the military and bans Suu Kyi from holding office.
Cyclone hits
- May 2008: Cyclone Nargis hits the Irrawaddy delta. Some estimates number 138,000 people left dead or missing by the cyclone. Referendum proceeds amid humanitarian crisis following cyclone.
Government says 92 per cent voted in favour of draft constitution and insists it can cope with cyclone aftermath without international aid.
Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest is renewed.
- Jan 2009: Thailand expels hundreds of members of Burma's Muslim Rohingya minority who appeared off its coast. Burma denies the minority's existence.
- April 2009: NLD offers to take part in planned elections if the government frees all political prisoners, changes the constitution and allows in international observers.
- May 2009: Burma's new constitution is confirmed and enacted.
- Aug 2009: Suu Kyi sentenced to 18 months under house arrest (reduced from three years in jail) and American man John Yettaw sentenced to seven years of hard labour.
The European Union said it would toughen its sanctions against Myanmar after Tuesday's latest conviction of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and France and Britain called for global arms and economic embargoes.

History 130 Years of People, Partnership and Performance

Our company has a long, robust history, which began when a group of explorers and merchants established the Pacific Coast Oil Co. on Sept. 10, 1879. Since then, our company's name has changed more than once, but we've always retained our founders' spirit, grit, innovation and perseverance.
Over the past 130 years, we joined with other companies, each with their own history, strengths and character. We've grown from a San Francisco-based company with a five-state market in the Western United States to a major corporation whose subsidiaries conduct business worldwide. Throughout, we’ve retained our fundamental purpose: to provide the energy people need to fuel human progress.
After 16 years, several judges, accusations of espionage, and more twists and turns than a spy novel, the case of Amazon peasants versus the mighty Chevron may soon be coming to an end. If you're unfamiliar with the case, Chevron stands accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater into the Amazon rainforest, which left local people stricken by cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. The New York Times yesterday looked into some of the recent plot twists that involve a revolving door for judges and secret video tapes.

Ever since the oil giant released videos in August that were secretly taped by two businessmen who seemed to have the ambition of feasting off the expected $27 billion in damages sought, Ecuadorean officials and Chevron have accused each other of gross improprieties, including espionage.
The Ecuadorean judge hearing the case recused himself after he appeared in the recordings discussing the case and potential damages. He was returned to the case by another judge, but he was then removed again.

The two mysterious businessmen, who used watches and pens implanted with bugging devices to make the recordings, have refused to explain their motivations for going to the furtive meetings in Quito and a jungle outpost to discuss a bribery plot. And now, with questions mounting, one of them has enlisted a lawyer who has represented Barry Bonds.

No one really know what will happen as a result of the tapes. They appear to have been recorded without consent, making them illegal under Ecuadorean law. Chevron claims they have nothing to do with the tapes, but they are using them to try to prove there is a conspiracy against them.

Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network have been following the $27 billion dollar lawsuit, the largest environmental lawsuit in history. 60 Minutes profiled the lawsuit in a much discussed piece that you can view here.
Amazon Crude on 60 Minutes
http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2009/0503-60-minutes-amazon-crude.html

In San Francisco Court for Nigerian Human Rights Case

Chevron Faces Torture, Wrongful Death, Assault, And Other Claims
Chevron is in San Francisco Federal Court this week, defending itself against charges that it helped kill two Nigerian villagers who were protesting the companies' lack of social responsibility and regard for the environment. At the heart of the case is the question of whether Nigerian protesters did so peacefully or with force. More below the fold.

Chevron has hired William J. Haynes, a former Bush Administration lawyer, to take their case. Nigerian protesters are testifying against Chevron in response to violent reactions to a 1998 protest they took part in on a barge tethered to a Chevron offshore rig. The 100 to 150 Nigerian protesters on the barge claim they were peacefully opposing the companies' environmental and economic wrong-doings in the region when, on May 28, 1998, helicopters flew Nigerian soldiers onto the rig. The soldiers fired into the crowd on the barge, killing two protesters and injuring others.

The case is expected to run through December and has just begun to highlight the environmental and economic damage Chevron is having on the Niger Delta.

Other human rights and environmentally related cases Chevron currently faces include:
-in Ecuador, Chevron lawyers and local government officials are being faced with charges for lying about environmental damages caused by what has been called the worst oil-related disaster on Earth
-in Burma, Chevron is being criticized for a pipeline project that produces close to $1 billion annually for the country's military regime
The US imports more oil from Nigeria than it does from Iraq. Yet Nigeria, and the myriad human rights and environmental abuses associated with oil development there, are rarely in the news.

Yesterday, I joined a group of Nigerian activists and environmental and social justice advocates from around the Bay Area at a rally to mark the opening of a landmark court case, Bowoto v. Chevron. Chevron is being sued by 19 plaintiffs, including organizer Larry Bowoto, for partnering with a notoriously violent military force to fire upon a peaceful protest of over a hundred villagers in the Niger Delta.

The case is one of the first times a U.S. corporation has been tried in the United States for human rights abuses it committed abroad. As young people who are increasingly aware of the often violent journey a gallon of oil takes from a foreign country to our gas tank, this case is well worth paying attention to.
Dan Firger, a law student who will be live blogging the court case over the next week, explained the background yesterday:
In 1998, Larry Bowoto and about 100 other community members staged a peaceful protest at one of Chevron’s offshore oil platforms, demanding a meeting between company representatives and village elders to negotiate for the job training and education programs they had been promised in exchange for the severe environmental harms they had been forced to endure. They were unarmed, and after receiving word that Chevron would attend a meeting in a nearby village the following day, they prepared to leave the platform peacefully.
Before they could do so, three company helicopters carrying Nigerian military personnel swooped down on the platform and opened fire, killing two people and injuring several others, including Bowoto. Allegedly acting at the direction of Chevron, soldiers detained and tortured several other protestors, after which company personnel paid them for their services.
Bowoto and his co-plaintiffs filed their suit in 1999 in United States District Court in San Francisco. After nearly a decade of legal wrangling, the case now stands as an important milestone in the history of international human rights law: for the first time, a U.S. company could potentially be held liable in U.S. courts for gross human rights abuses committed in their overseas operations.
The fact that the case has even made it to court is a major accomplishment, as Chevron has battled it every step of the way. Chevron isn’t alone in its efforts to block human rights cases. Oil companies have a long history of attempting to subvert the legal process to escape trial. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Sunday:
A suit against Unocal by Burmese villagers, who blamed the company for forced labor, rape and torture by soldiers at a natural gas pipeline, was scheduled for trial in Los Angeles in 2005, but the company settled it for an undisclosed amount of money. A suit similar to Bowoto’s, filed against Royal Dutch Shell by Nigerians including relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer and activist hanged by the military regime in 1995, is scheduled to go to trial in New York in February.
“Courts have been vigilant in allowing only the most well-founded cases to go forward,” said attorney Marco Simons of the nonprofit advocacy group EarthRights International, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. A victory in this case, he said, would send a message to corporations operating abroad that “if they are complicit in human rights abuses, they can expect to be held accountable.”
The Chronicle article also gives Chevron’s point of view in the case. The company claims that Boweto and his group were not peaceful protesters, but armed mercenaries. From what I’ve read, this doesn’t seem to be the case, but the Niger Delta is an incredibly tumultuous and complicated place. Either way, the oil company was deeply involved in the violence and the case is a bold attempt to hold them accountable.
A coalition of groups in the Bay Area is mobilizing to draw attention to the case and support the Nigerian plaintiffs. The following groups are all good resources to learn more about the issues behind this case: Amazon Watch, Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network Food and Water Watch , People’s Health Movement , Hesperian Foundation , Other Worlds, West County Toxics, Communities for a Better Environment, Burmese American Democratic Alliance, Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity, Asian Pacific Environmental Network - Laoian Organizing Project.
Corporate Pollution in Ecuador, Biggest Environmental lawsuit in history. Chevron Vs Ecuador27 July, 2009 4 comments Uncategorized
I have sourced a couple of exerpts on what could eb the biggest lawsuit in history, a horrific example of a corporation, strongly linked with the government, putting profit infront of the environment in a less developed company.

It is easy to strike oil in Lago Agrio these days.
"After almost 40 years of drilling, this stretch of Amazon jungle on Ecuador’s border with Colombia is pockmarked with long, deep pits of viscous black crude or blended oil and earth that the locals call “swimming pools”.


About 916 pits were used by Texaco Petroleum, the US oil major, and PetroEcuador, the state company, for the 23 years before Texaco’s exit from the country in 1992.
Now they are at the centre of what is shaping up to be the biggest environmental lawsuit in history, with $27bn (€19bn, £16bn) in potential damages sought against Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001. That is almost seven times the damages awarded against ExxonMobil for its 1989 Alaska spill.
“The only other oil problem that might be comparable is the first Gulf war, in which Iraq trashed Kuwait’s oil fields,” says Douglas Beltman, an environmental scientist for the plaintiffs, rubbing crude-tainted mud from a riverbank between his fingers. “That’s the scale of contamination we are looking at.”
(And thats from a US corporation! not the regimes the US so vehemently hate, Tom)

"After 15 years of litigation, almost every other aspect of the case is contested. Lawyers who brought the class-action suit against Chevron say Texaco operated below environmental standards of the day to maximise profits.
They allege the company released 18.5bn gallons of produced water – the hot salty byproduct of drilling – into waterways instead of reinjecting it deep into the earth; that it used unlined earthen pits for permanent rather than temporary storage of waste; and that it chose not to report many spills. They allege widespread contamination of waterways and high levels of associated sickness, including cancer.
Chevron, the world’s third biggest oil company, denies the charges, accusing the plaintiffs of a blatant “shakedown” and the court of bias.
It says its responsibility ended when it cleaned up 37.5 per cent of the well sites as part of a $40m remediation agreement with the Ecuadorean government in 1995. PetroEcuador, Texaco’s consortium partner, which continues to operate in Lago Agrio, has responsibility for the remaining sites, it argues. PetroEcuador declined to comment.
In the 15 years that Chevron has been fighting the charges in both US and Ecuadorean courts, it has seen the damages claim shoot up to exceed its estimates of the $490m profit it says Texaco made over 26 years as operator of the consortium."

Chevron Says-

“We feel the court process in Ecuador is so badly tainted it is virtually irredeemable at this point,” says James Craig, a Chevron spokesman, standing on a site he says Texaco successfully remediated. “We are being pursued under a law that did not exist until nine years after Texaco ceased to operate in the country . . . They [the plaintiffs] illegally abandoned the evidential phase of the trial, which required both sides to present scientific evidence to a panel of five experts for assessment."
Ecuador Says- "Away from the courtroom, locals have seen little of the vast wealth that has flowed from the ground.
“All of our water in contaminated,” said Leonor Velasquez, a diminutive woman waiting in a health clinic. “We all have rashes, I am so itchy all the time.”
Donald Moncayo, an activist who conducts “toxic tours”, illustrated her point at a creek behind a nearby abandoned house, digging into the bank to reveal blackened soil reeking of oil. “Before it was worse,” he said. “This river was black, and the animals passed by and drank the water . . . the chickens and pigs were black.”
Roberto Poncé believes his son Jose Luis’s death from leukaemia seven years ago was linked to contamination by the oil industry. Jose Luis died the day after his 17th birthday."
"Ecuadorian trial judge, Juan Nuñez, hands down his decision this year, In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Nuñez, denied bias, saying the only pressure he felt was that of his own conscience. “People say this is the case of the century, that what happens here is important not just for Ecuador but for all humanity . . .  I see with my eyes. I see the damage; I see the contamination in the rivers.”
So there's a little bit, obviously there is two sides to the story, in terms of the litigation that is. But in my eyes, even if Chevron has been legally indemnified, has cleaned up 37.5% or whatever of the pollution, the muck is still there, and it represents a complete failure to act as a civilised race, unified by our part in Gaia (the earth system, google it, or i can blog it if anyone requests).
I think it is disgusting that a developed country can do this sort of thing, and i think its excellent that, at least in this case, the Ecuadorians (right word?) are fighting back, and doing a fair job of it. It would definitley be worth reading up further on this case, i think it could be quite applicable to the Indonesian YEs and i will blog any updates, especially as to the eagerly awaited verdict on this "case of the century".

http://truecostofchevron.com/report.html