A lot of my business comes from someone who has a problem and who knows someone who knows me. Then the first someone gets directed to me and asks, “Can you fix it?”
—Ely Calil
On a cold, damp November night several years ago, a Mercedes sedan looped through the semicircular drive of the Saint James Paris, a century-old château-style hotel across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. As the car rolled to a halt at the hotel’s main entrance, a well-tailored, trim man named Ely Calil walked unhurriedly out the lobby door and down wide stone steps, talking into an earpiece that was connected, through a thin black wire, to a tiny cell phone tucked in the closed palm of one hand. The driver stepped from the car and opened the door for Calil, who interrupted his conversation to give the driver instructions. He spoke in a voice a little above a whisper, perhaps just a touch softer than his normal cool, flat tone. The driver returned to his seat and steered the car out through the granite-pillared entryway and onto Avenue Bugeaud.
That night Calil’s destination was Spring, a popular restaurant in the ninth arrondissement that offers a set four-course menu to sixteen diners nightly. He was meeting Friedhelm Eronat, a close friend and sometime business partner who is equally reclusive and press-averse. Like Calil, he is one of the world’s leading oil fixers, having grown rich brokering deals for Mobil (before it merged with Exxon) in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria. A confidential corporate due diligence report about Eronat that I obtained said that the precise nature of his relationship with Mobil was the “subject of much conjecture,” but his contacts “went straight to the top.” More recently he has done business in Argentina, Brazil, and China.
Calil had flown to Paris earlier that day from London, where he resides. Born in Nigeria in 1945 to a prominent family of Lebanese origin, Calil belongs to a small group of middlemen, a few dozen at most. They quietly arrange deals and financial transfers—not necessarily illegal—that are vital to the oil industry’s operations. Calil has funneled money to African dictators to obtain concessions for oil companies, traded oil from Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and advised presidents and exiled political leaders.
Along the way he has not only amassed an immense personal fortune but has established a web of political ties stretching from Africa to the Middle East and the United States. “He’s built a very effective network of contacts and allegiances and loyalties through money and allowances,” a former senior CIA official who has worked with Calil told me, not without admiration. “It’s sort of like The Godfather. One day he’ll come to ask for a favor, and you’ll have to comply.”
A former friend of Calil’s, who broke with him over a business deal gone bad, spoke bitterly about him but conceded, “He’s a lovable rogue and a very shrewd operator, there’s no doubt about that.”
A fixer’s business demands discretion. “If you go and blab about your contacts, and talk about being a friend of the president, the next thing you know the president doesn’t want to be your friend,” one middleman told me. Calil, for his part, largely avoided publicity for most of his lengthy career. Although he is said to be one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and is a regular on the London club circuit, his name rarely surfaced in the press; for decades, the only photograph newspapers could find to accompany articles about him was a snapshot from his 1972 wedding to the American tobacco heiress Frances Condon, the first of his three wives. Little was known about the man himself, and the few news stories about him described him variously as “reclusive,” “secretive to the point of obsession,” and a businessman “whose privacy is guarded like a Mogul emperor.”
However, in 2004 Calil became the subject of intense and unflattering press scrutiny. That year a group of about sixty South African and European mercenaries were arrested in Zimbabwe, where they were buying weapons. The men were said to be en route to Equatorial Guinea. It was a tale straight from The Dogs of War, and Obiang’s regime and the alleged ringleader, Simon Mann, subsequently claimed that Calil had financed the coup plot in hopes of installing in power an exiled political leader named Severo Moto. The accusations have never been proven, and Calil vociferously denies he had any role in the affair. But the scandal that followed received worldwide publicity and embroiled well-known acquaintances of his, including Mark Thatcher, the son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and Lord Jeffrey Archer, whom scandal had twice forced to resign from parliament and who did prison time for perjury.
My acquaintance with Calil began two years before the alleged coup attempt, when I received a call from Victoria Butler, a Washington public-relations specialist who was then helping Moto meet with government officials and journalists. I’d written frequently about the Obiang regime, and so I went to see Moto at Butler’s townhouse on Capitol Hill. He had already met with a number of Bush administration officials and members of Congress, and he expressed a naive optimism that the administration might eventually turn against Obiang because of his undeniably appalling human rights record.
As Moto and I chatted on a sofa, another man sat nearby in an armchair and scrolled through his e-mails on a BlackBerry. It was Calil, who told me that he and a number of other businessmen had sponsored Moto’s trip and had retained Butler through a PR office. I had never heard of Calil, and when I returned home that day and used Google to try to find out more, I turned up little outside of a few small clips in European oil-industry publications. His name had briefly surfaced in a bribery scandal in France, where reports alleged that he funneled money to former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha on behalf of Elf Aquitaine, a French oil company (which later was bought by a French competitor, Total).
Since that first meeting, Calil and I became unlikely friends. My family and I get together with him when he comes to Washington, and on a number of occasions I’ve visited him at his home in London. I’ve always liked Calil, and enjoyed his company, and appreciated the fact that he rarely tried to dress up his motives as altruistic, as oil company executives and industry players so often do. Oil had made Calil rich and that was why he was in the business.
By the time of his meeting in Paris with Eronat, the worst of the Equatorial Guinea–related publicity had blown over, and Calil had regained a measure of his preferred anonymity. I’d long wanted to profile him and having finally convinced him, was with him that night.
Eronat was awaiting us at a corner table when we arrived at the restaurant. Eronat used to live in a Victorian mansion down the road from Calil in London’s Chelsea section but following an acrimonious separation and pending divorce, he was spending most of his time in Geneva and Paris, where he owns an apartment near the Saint James. He was waiting with his longtime partner, a tall, blond Russian attired in a dark dress and knee-length black boots, and her friend, Angelika, a Russian model who had dark hair and porcelain skin, and wore jeans, a white cotton shirt, and a dark vest. Whereas Eronat’s partner was gregarious and chatty, Angelika, perhaps because of her halting English, sat quietly at the table and occupied much of her time checking text messages on her cell phone.
I had never met Eronat or seen his photograph, but based on his name I had envisioned a refined, stuffy Central European aristocrat. It turns out that he was born Romanian1 but came with his mother to Louisiana when he was a young boy. Tall and hefty, he looked quite a bit younger than his fifty-five years, and was dressed casually, in light-brown corduroys and a tan pullover. Eronat studied petroleum engineering at Louisiana State University in the 1970s and got a job as an engineer after graduating, then went to work for an oil-trading firm before branching out on his own.
Eronat met Calil in the early 1980s, in Nigeria. “Ely was the man to see,” Eronat recalled, after sampling a red wine and then ordering several bottles for the table. “Back then,” he added, “it was a very small club, and we all knew one another. You did business by gentleman’s agreement. When you called and said you had a cargo of crude, you confirmed the price and details over the phone. If your word wasn’t honored, you were finished.”
Eronat’s own contacts in Nigeria were also strong. The due diligence report said his influence in the country was “based on his ability to sustain long-term relationships with key members of several Nigerian administrations,” including military leaders and powerful civilians like Rilwanu Lukman, who in the 1980s was minister for petroleum and later was named secretary general of OPEC.
For years Calil and Eronat attended the twice-a-year meetings of OPEC oil ministers. “There were twenty regulars, if you want to be generous,” Calil said. “You’d meet all the ministers and entertain them.” Eronat pulled out his cell phone and showed me a picture from the 2008 meeting in Saudi Arabia of OPEC heads of state (which is one level up from the ministerial meetings). It was hard to make out much on the small cell phone screen, but I could just see a beaming Eronat, dressed in a Western business suit and surrounded by people in Middle Eastern garb.
The two men have partnered together numerous times, though “we never had anything in writing, Friedhelm and I, not once,” Calil said of their dealings. One particularly profitable stretch involved exporting oil from Russia in the early post-Soviet days. Calil recounted that they had met many of the country’s future oligarchs “when they were wearing funny suits and selling shoes and cigarette lighters.”
The two men spoke of some old comrades who had fallen on hard times following the global market turmoil of the late 2000s. “They’re all selling their yachts,” Eronat said with a grim look. One mutual friend, an oligarch they called Sascha, “had $44 billion, and now he’s down to a billion.”
“It happens,” Calil deadpanned.
The waiter brought a bouillabaisse, small plates of scallops in a truffle sauce, and veal loin with poached pear. Everyone agreed the food was delicious, but there were complaints about the “presentation.” Calil and Eronat, serious gourmets, seemed particularly dismayed. The two men decided to head to the famous brasserie L’Ami Louis for a proper meal. (This would include more wine, a plate of potatoes baked with dollops of goose fat and topped with shaved garlic, foie gras, and toast and cornichons, scallops, and snails in butter and garlic.)
For years L’Ami Louis was a sort of headquarters for their mutual operations, and they reminisced about a dinner there in the mid-1990s when they hosted fourteen well-connected Russians. “It was just them and the two of us,” Eronat recalled while we were still at Spring. “We ordered a bottle of wine, and then another and another”—he mimed guzzling directly from the bottle—“until the waiter just brought a case of wine and put it on the ground next to our table.” It was an extraordinarily expensive meal, the two men recalled, but well worth it, in that it played an important role in advancing their Russia business.
Calil asked for the check before dessert was served and called L’Ami Louis from his cell phone. “You don’t ask for a table, you just say you’re coming,” he said as he hung up.
The next morning, when I sat down for coffee with Calil and Eronat at the Saint James, Eronat was reading the International Herald Tribune. He folded the paper, pushed it my way, and pointed to a story: Spain’s government was hesitating to allow the Russian company Lukoil to buy a controlling stake in Repsol YPF, Spain’s largest oil firm. “Oil is not a commodity,” Eronat said. “It’s a political weapon.”
“Absolutely,” Calil said as picked up his espresso cup. “That’s why the Americans made that stop in Iraq.”
Eronat told me that there used to be “about forty people” who ran the oil-trading business. “The world got bigger, especially when the oil market boomed and the hedge funds came in, but it’s still a pretty small group of people,” he said.
Calil and Eronat spoke about a mutual friend of theirs named James Giffen, a New York business consultant who was charged by the US government with allegedly funneling more than $78 million to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan. The money was said to come from fees paid to Giffen by American oil companies that subsequently won stakes in Kazakh oil fields. Giffen also gave Nazarbayev and his wife gifts, including his-and-hers snowmobiles and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry. “Oil fields are a battleground,” said Eronat. “If Jim had not been involved, other [non-American] firms would have gotten the contracts, and the loser would have been the US government.”
The federal indictment of Giffen, who established close ties to governments in the former Soviet Union during the Cold War, alleged that Nazarbayev assigned him to negotiate deals with foreign oil companies seeking to invest in Kazakhstan after the country’s independence in 1991. Giffen accompanied the Kazakh leader to Washington for meetings with American officials and in 1998 even assembled a team of political consultants to lobby the US government on Nazarbayev’s behalf. “He was Washington’s de facto ambassador to Kazakhstan,” Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, told me.
Giffen never specifically denied funneling money to Nazarbayev but claimed his role and actions were fully known by the US government. A filing from his lawyers claimed that Giffen’s acts might seem unusual, but that “imposing American domestic conceptions of honest services on all the world’s governments” would “wreak havoc” on the workings of international law.
Calil, who had recently visited Giffen in New York, concurred. “Jim never worked for the CIA, but he continuously informed the CIA,” he said, a line of argument that Giffen advanced in court. “He was never discouraged, and in fact was encouraged to have that relationship with Nazarbayev. You don’t take him to court—you give him a medal.”
The judge in the case, William Pauley, agreed. In late 2010, after the Justice Department dropped all bribery counts in exchange for a misdemeanor tax plea, Pauley imposed no jail time on Giffen, called him a Cold War “hero,” and said the government should never even have brought the case. “He was one of the only Americans with sustained access to high levels of government in the region,” Pauley said. “These relationships, built up over a lifetime, were lost the day of his arrest. This ordeal must end. How does Mr. Giffen reclaim his reputation? This court begins by acknowledging his service.”
In 2002, Calil himself was arrested by French police and briefly jailed in connection with the payments of enormous commissions to Sani Abacha by a subsidiary of Elf Aquitaine. During a judicial investigation, Philippe Jaffré, a former Elf CEO, confirmed that the payments were made. “The Nigerian oil fields were extraordinarily profitable,” he said. “There was no other way to reach a friendly agreement.” Jaffré said, however, that Calil and two other Lebanese intermediaries—Gilbert Chagoury and Samir Traboulsi—“apparently received more money than foreseen.” By Jaffré’s account, the three split $70 million among them for their role in moving the funds.
Despite a lengthy investigation, Calil was never formally charged in the affair (though a number of Elf executives were sent to jail for embezzling millions of dollars from the company). He acknowledged having received commissions from Elf in order to funnel payments to Abacha, saying, “From a strictly legal standpoint, there was nothing strictly illegal about it. It has become illegal now. The commissions I took from the French companies were sanctioned by the French Ministry of Finance. They had to declare the commissions on their taxes. If it’s wrong, then arrest the minister of finance. Why are you arresting me? Was it legal? Yes. Was it moral? I don’t know. But business isn’t about not making money. I’m not a philosopher, but the law is there to be tested. If you’re on the wrong side you should be sanctioned, and if you’re not you should be left alone.
“Americans want their gasoline cheap,” Calil added. “But it’s not possible without cutting a few corners.”
Among the thornier political issues surrounding oil is that most of it is extracted from undeveloped nations and shipped to rich ones, whose home companies pump it. Sometimes, a company will reach out to rulers of oil-rich states on its own, negotiating and striking deals with them through official emissaries. That’s especially true of multinational giants such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, who have worked around the globe, in high-risk and low-risk countries, and can handle such matters on their own. “We were so damn big that we usually didn’t need middleman,” a former BP executive told me. “We worked directly with heads of states in the countries where we operated, and we could deliver [to those heads of state] geopolitical contacts back home that served their aspirations. When you’re with BP, you can always arrange a meeting with the prime minister or tea with the Queen.”
But often companies (including the giants) will instead work through men like Calil and Eronat: independent fixers, whose job it is to know the leaders and other government officials for whom oil serves as both piggy bank and political weapon. “Intermediaries can play a pivotal role in bridging the gaps of distance, time, custom and language between the corporate culture of the principal and the local business community,” says a business guidebook prepared by TRACE International, which offers antibribery compliance advice for multinational companies.
[But] the qualities that make an intermediary attractive to a company often are the same as those that make the relationship risky. Successful intermediaries are persuasive, well connected and tenacious. If the intermediary has no business advantages apart from personal connections, a more significant inquiry is warranted.
For international oil companies, working with fixers is only illegal if they are caught paying bribes or otherwise enriching foreign officials, but it requires careful due diligence. “Red flags go up any time you use a partner in an especially corrupt country, and especially if he is reputedly corrupt,” says Homer Moyer, an attorney at the Washington firm of Miller & Chevalier and leading expert on the FCPA. “It’s a little like unprotected sex. You’re at the mercy of whom you get into bed with.”
Fixers have always served an essential function in the oil business. The first to work on an international scale was Calouste Gulbenkian, a stateless Armenian Turk whose father was a banker and a major kerosene importer for the Ottoman empire. Known as “Five Percent” and the “Talleyrand of oil diplomacy,” Calouste studied mining engineering at King’s College in London, and upon graduation in 1887, was sent by his father to the Caspian port city of Baku to learn the oil trade. The young Gulbenkian wrote a series of scholarly articles that piqued the interest of the Ottoman Department of Mines. Officials there asked Gulbenkian to draw up a report on oil resources, and he pointed to several areas of great potential in the region. “Thus began Calouste Gulbenkian’s lifelong devotion to Mesopotamian oil, to which he would apply himself with extraordinary dedication and tenacity over six decades,” Daniel Yergin recounts in his definitive history of oil, The Prize.
Gulbenkian’s fantastic success as an oil broker depended on his knowledge of the region and his cozy relationships—with Turkish officials, on the one hand, and with European and American oilmen on the other. In 1898, two years after he and his family fled the Armenian genocide, the Ottoman government appointed him financial adviser to its Paris and London embassies. In 1902, he obtained British citizenship, cementing his connection with the most powerful player in the partitioning of the Middle East. About a decade later, Gulbenkian helped broker a deal that led to the creation of the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was established to exploit Middle Eastern oil fields. The joint owners, which included Royal Dutch Shell, the National Bank of Turkey, and various German and British investors, granted him a 5 percent nonvoting share in the new company—hence Gulbenkian’s nickname.
Sixteen years later Gulbenkian drew the map that defined a cooperative agreement among the French, Dutch, British, and Americans—their governments and companies—to extract oil from the former Ottoman territories. This Red Line Agreement earned him the bulk of his fortune, and his success established the model of the independent, cash-dispensing oil fixer.
The modus operandi was simple and straightforward: The fixer took money from a company seeking an energy concession, kept one part for himself, and funneled the rest into a Swiss bank account belonging to foreign officials, who awarded the concession. When the officials got their money, the fixer’s sponsor got its contract. “For years you could not operate in many oil-producing countries without an agent, especially in the Middle East,” Willy Olsen, a former senior executive at Norway’s Statoil, told me. “If you had the wrong agent, one without the right connections, you were not relevant at all.”2
Today fixers still play a vital role for oil companies in their dealings with heads of state and other government officials who, in the delicate phrasing of Laurent Ruseckas, an international energy analyst in London, “don’t know how to commercialize their power.” But although straightforward cash bribes are still employed, the means of the payoff have become more complex. Partly this is for legal reasons. The United States outlawed bribery abroad in 1977, when the FCPA was passed. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development passed similar rules in 1997; until then, many European countries allowed their firms to deduct bribes on corporate income-tax statements. With the heightened legal risk, the greater public scrutiny of international business, and the more sophisticated government methods of monitoring bank transfers, payoffs now take a multitude of forms. Indeed, while as opaque as before and serving the same purpose, modern-day payoffs are not always illegal. “I spent 99 percent of my time trying to figure out ways to not technically violate the FCPA,” a former Mobil executive in Angola once told me.
“Corruption isn’t endemic in the energy business because people in the industry are more corrupt or have lower morals but because you’re dealing with huge sums of capital,” Keith Myers, a London-based consultant and former BP executive, told me. “A million dollars here or there doesn’t make any difference to the overall economics of a project, but it can make a huge difference to the economics of a few individuals who can delay or stop or approve the project.”
Given the profits involved in the energy business, sometimes even a few hundred million dollars doesn’t make much of a difference. In February 2012, Jack Stanley, a former senior executive at Halliburton, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to charges involving bribes paid to Nigerian officials to win a mammoth energy project in that country. The story dates to 1995, when a four-member international consortium that included Houston-based M. W. Kellogg, a firm that Halliburton later bought, was awarded the first of three contracts to build a natural gas plant in Nigeria. That same year the consortium hired a British lawyer named Jeffrey Tesler, who had ties to senior Nigerian officials, to handle the natural gas plant business.
Over the next five years the consortium paid $176 million to Tri-Star Investments, a Gibraltar-based firm established by Tesler. That money was routed to Tri-Star through a company set up by the consortium on the Portuguese island of Madeira. It’s not clear where all of that money went, but Tesler is believed to have kept a relatively small part of it and used the rest to pay kickbacks to Nigerian officials. It was a lot of bribe money but still very little compared to the nearly $6 billion in contracts that the consortium received as part of the natural gas project.
Tesler was extradited to the US and also sentenced to prison time for two counts of breaking foreign bribery law. “I allowed myself to accept standards of behavior in a business culture which can never be justified,” he told the court in Houston at that time. “I accepted the system of corruption that existed in Nigeria. There is no day when I do not regret my weakness of character and being caught up in a violent military culture with customs that are harmful to the social fabric and breach of laws.”
Edward Chow, a former Chevron executive who spent more than three decades in the oil business, described to me the logic by which intermediaries thrive. The process for awarding oil contracts and concessions in Third World countries is inherently politicized and centralized, he explained, because mineral resources typically belong to the state and decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a dictator or a small group: “In Texas, I can convince landowners to lease me their mineral rights. They get a royalty check every month, and the companies leave a small footprint on their land. What’s not to love? There is no equivalent in places like Nigeria or Angola or Kazakhstan. You get the land, but you don’t provide a lot of jobs, you may be destroying the environment, and most of the profit goes to international capital. The companies don’t have a strong case to sell to local communities, so they come to not only accept highly centralized government, but to crave it. A strongman president can make all the necessary decisions. It’s a lot easier to win support from the top than to build it from the bottom.
“The question becomes how you reach the key decision makers—and that’s where middlemen come in. You’re looking to increase your access vis-à-vis the competition, and retaining the right fixer may be the best vehicle. You think, If this guy can get us the appointment and get to the decision makers—and usually they are just a handful at most—then it’s worth spending the money, no matter what you have to pay. In some ways it’s not that different from hiring lobbyists or giving campaign contributions. We just do it in a different way.”
Although bribery and other payoffs have undeniably been part of the fixers’ trade, the best are far more than bagmen to dictators. “There’s a real art to acting as an agent, and the role differs from country to country,” Robin Bhatty, an energy industry analyst, told me. “In most of the world, business is done on a personal basis. The best way of getting something done is finding someone who knows someone who you want to know, and you use them to make introductions.” (“Just the same way you’re calling me now,” he added, after I asked him to put me in touch with some energy industry officials I was hoping to interview.)
Because oil fixers play such an important and sensitive role, they can accumulate extraordinary power with heads of state, who often bestow on them the title of presidential adviser and grant them use of a diplomatic passport. “Trading in weapons is trading in sovereignty,” says Philippe Vasset, editor of the Paris-based newsletter Africa Energy Intelligence. “If you don’t have them, you can’t defend your borders. It’s the same with oil, which gives you the liberty to run your ships and planes and tanks, and your economy. If you don’t have it, you can’t run your country.”
Key brokers who emerged in the post-1973 OPEC world included: Marc Rich, who founded the giant commodities firm Glencore (see Chapter 3); Hany Salaam, a Lebanese middleman who made numerous deals for Occidental Petroleum Corporation during the days of Armand Hammer, its former chairman; and Oscar Wyatt, a Houston oilman and corporate raider who was sentenced to a year in prison in 2007 in connection with the UN oil-for-food scandal.
One of the more colorful of that era’s fixers was John Deuss, who once owned his own tanker fleet, and who during the 1980s smuggled vast quantities of oil to South Africa’s apartheid regime, then under an international trade embargo imposed by the United Nations. In 1979, after the overthrow of the shah, Iran stopped exporting oil to South Africa’s apartheid regime, due to the embargo. Using fake documents and transferring oil from one tanker to another on the high seas, Deuss smuggled more than one hundred million barrels of crude to South Africa over the next four years.
“Guests invited to one or another of his residences found John Deuss to be a supremely hospitable host,” writes Steve LeVine, author of The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea.
He often flew them in, aboard a pair of luxury Gulfstream jets, or ferried them around the Caribbean … on Fluertje, a 150-foot yacht large enough for formal dinners on deck.
One oil industry veteran told me of Deuss: “You’d go to him and say, ‘I need to see three people for a deal I’m working on.’ He’d charge enormous fees, but he’d bring those three people to his home in Los Angeles and you’d meet them.”
Homegrown fixers have emerged in Third World countries in recent years and become giants of the business. A major player in African energy markets is Samuel Dossou-Aworet, who was the longtime oil and financial adviser to Gabonese president Omar Bongo, who took power in 1967. Swiss and American investigators found that Dossou had opened accounts for Bongo at Citibank’s private banking department in Paris and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in Geneva. A 1999 Senate report on money laundering indicated that in total Bongo had $130 million deposited with Citibank’s private banking department.
Citibank officials set up accounts for Bongo in the name of Tendin Investments. In a November 6, 1998, e-mail, one bank executive warned of dire consequences of closing the Bongo accounts, even if they held corrupt proceeds.
Whatever internal considerations we satisfy, the marketing fallout is likely to be serious. Sam [Dossou] gets his marching orders from Tendin. Tendin has been vitally instrumental in our franchise’s success over the years … Sam helped the Branch considerably over the last two years to obtain a more reasonable and rightful share of public sector deposits, with Tendin’s blessing.3
Dossou now runs a Monaco-based firm called Petrolin that reportedly markets the Gabonese government’s share of oil exports. According to his bio on the Petrolin Web site, Dossou has “provided strategic input in the development of prominent oil companies and government entities” in more than a dozen countries, from Egypt to South Africa. “Dossou is trusted because he’s got twenty years of unbridled reliability,” says a First World oil consultant who has worked with him. “He’s good to his word, even if it costs him, and in Africa that’s worth a lot.”
Before the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, London-based Mohammed Ajami, brother of the prominent Lebanese writer Fouad Ajami, helped companies looking for business in Libya. His utility to oil companies was based on his close relationship with the country’s intelligence chief, Musa Kusa.
Another key Gaddafi-era fixer was Jack Richards, an American based in London who operated through a British Virgin Islands–registered firm, and who developed a close friendship with Libya’s ruling family. The Guardian newspaper uncovered a 2005 memo written by one of Richards’s oil industry clients, Petro-Canada (now Suncor Energy), which said that he had been based in Tripoli in the 1960s when he was working for the American communications company RCA and gave English lessons to a number of young army officers, including, as luck would have it, one named Muammar Gaddafi. The memo said:
After the 1 September 1969 coup [which brought Gaddafi to power], Richards suddenly discovered that his students now occupied many of the most prominent positions in the country. It is alleged that he was [later] responsible for obtaining prime exploration blocks for one of the foreign oil companies now in Libya.
The Guardian story, which was published in 2011, said that Richards had taken Saif Gaddafi shooting on Princess Anne’s estate and that his daughter had helped research Saif’s PhD thesis at the London School of Economics. “I may have given advice to some people at one time but … I think I hadn’t travelled to Libya for some years even,” Richards told the Guardian. As for Saif, he said, “The more I see of him the more disappointed I am in him and what he’s doing in that country.”
I was able to see some of a fixer’s work firsthand when Calil brought me along to a meeting with a New York hedge fund whose offices overlooked Park Avenue just south of Grand Central Station. Calil and a few of his associates gathered around a conference table with the fund’s two bosses, whose names I agreed to withhold. One was American, neatly groomed and dressed, with the personality of an accountant; the other was Austrian, and he did most of the talking. The Austrian wore blue jeans and a white dress shirt with a few buttons undone, and his hair was wild, like Einstein’s. Eccentric, arrogant, and utterly obnoxious—all traits that no doubt served him well in directing the hedge fund—he was flying off to St. Tropez the next day for a dental appointment.
The Austrian began the meeting by telling Calil and his associates a little bit about the fund. He explained how (no doubt for tax purposes) the firm’s myriad assets were “ring fenced” in Panama, Luxembourg, and the British Virgin Islands, with separate contracts to operate each property. Its holdings included a boot factory in China and 150,000 hectares of Brazilian rain forest, he said, though when I asked him where the property in Brazil was, he had no idea. The fund also had bought two defunct oil refineries, and these acquisitions were to be the subject of the day’s meeting. Because the refineries were quite old and could process only very dirty crude, few countries would allow them to operate today. When the fund took over the refineries it believed it had buyers who would reassemble them elsewhere, but the deals fell through. Now both of the refineries were crated up, and in one case the hedge fund had a contract requiring that the refinery be removed in a matter of months.
The fund had hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in these two refineries, so they were calling on Ely Calil for his expertise in unloading them. It was just the sort of challenge, and potentially huge payoff, that Calil relished. “I like to take on deals with 15 or 20 percent chance of success,” he had explained to me a few days earlier. “If the odds are 1 percent, it’s not worth my while, and if they’re 50 percent, it’s not that interesting, because there are two thousand people who can do it, so why would they pay me $15 million to do it?”
As he and the Austrian discussed the problem, a curious negotiation began to take place. The latter took great pains to stress how trifling this matter was to him; if Calil could help, then great, his tone implied, but otherwise he had many ways to resolve the situation. Calil clearly saw through this pose but did his admirable best to remain polite.
“Perhaps it’s just my fatalism,” he began, “but it’s not going to be easy to sell the refineries.” He pointed out that few countries today could possibly accept refineries so noxious. Angola had potential, he said, but the country was so corrupt, and its bureaucracy so complicated, that a deal would be hard to strike. Nigeria was, in theory, another option, but again the politics were complex. “You’d need to find a state governor to support the project, and it’s possible that that could be arranged, but you also already have all the turmoil in the Delta region,” which added, he said, an additional political complication.
The Austrian insisted that he already had a number of possibilities in play, and that he even had a “process” whereby he was evaluating those possibilities. He mentioned Pakistan in particular: “We have government support in Pakistan. They can change the government three times, I don’t care. For me this new guy is better than the last one.” But he acknowledged that a refinery there would be in constant danger of having its profits seized by the unstable government. “You have 170,000 starving people, and you don’t want them all running to Islamabad,” he said. “If you have an economic crisis and food prices are climbing, the government might step in and say to the owner, ‘You can only take a 2 percent profit.’ Maybe even for a few years you’d have to take no profit as a ‘contribution’ to the country.”
“Through your process and my fatalism,” Calil replied, “we’ve reached the same conclusion.” Of course the hedge fund didn’t really have an easy option in Pakistan, or anywhere else, and so it needed his help—for which he could command a steep price. Calil laid out a rough plan for how he might place at least one of the refineries. He had identified a potential spot in Lebanon, in the port city of Tripoli. An old refinery there had been shut down about thirty years ago; it was fed from a pipeline that originated in Kirkuk and ran through Syria. Now that the Iraqi government wanted to ship oil from Kirkuk again, Calil went on, Lebanon might be persuaded to site a refinery in the same spot. Of course, the hedge fund would need political support, but fortunately, Calil said, he knew the Lebanese energy minister, and also had political contacts in Syria and Iraq. The fund would also need petroleum engineers to work at the Tripoli site, but Calil had just such a team at the ready, a group of twenty-three Bosnian Muslims with whom he’d worked before on a project in China. As mosque-going Muslims, he pointed out, they were less likely to be shot at or kidnapped in Tripoli. It was agreed that within the month, Calil would take a delegation from the fund to Lebanon for meetings with the relevant players.
Later that day, after we left the meeting, Calil talked a little more about this deal, and how he happened to be so well situated to help the hedge fund out of its dilemma. “A friend of mine became energy minister in Lebanon—a good friend,” he recalled. “I said to him, ‘Congratulations. What sort of energy opportunities are there in Lebanon?’ We were just chatting. He mentioned that they hoped to get the Iraqi oil pipeline reopened, that that would solve a lot of economic problems. Just knowing that they are looking at that refinery: that knowledge is wealth in itself. You have that knowledge in your head. You also know that Syria imports so much, and Lebanon imports so much, and that the Syrians are talking to the Iraqis about opening the pipeline. All that knowledge provides a theoretical solution.”
He added: “You also need connections to deliver the solution—to influence the president, the prime minister, the relevant ministers. That is about relationships. If you don’t know the person directly, you know his cousin or someone close to his cousin.”
In this case, I asked him, how big a problem would it be to get the political support?
“As big as I want it to be,” he replied.
Calil said that approaching the Syrian government in the right fashion was essential: “If [the Austrian] goes in and says, I’ve come to increase the GDP of Lebanon by 5 percent, they’ll say, ‘Oh great, tell me more,’ and make sure it never happens. I obviously start off by saying I’m doing something that’s good for Syria. The key is distribution. You go to the important players and tell them this project will refine 150,000 barrels, and they know that part of that will go to their family or clan. Some of these refined products are in high demand, so being the distributor can make you good money. Forget about the profit from the refinery, this is just from the by-products.”
Until 2006, Calil resided at Sloane House, a Chelsea estate he owned.4 Perched behind gates of white stone, the estate was staffed to the hilt with servants and tastefully stocked with antique furniture, leather-bound books, and numerous busts of Napoleon, Calil’s hero. One Sunday afternoon I sat with him in his study and listened to him take phone calls, his patter seamlessly switching from Arabic to French to English and back again. There was a Libyan official who told Calil that Muammar Gaddafi wanted to host a future World Cup soccer tournament in Tripoli and was hoping to establish his bona fides in the meantime by sponsoring a minitournament. Could Calil help arrange for the Senegalese national team to take part? A call to an official in Senegal followed, as did a conversation with a well-connected friend in Lebanon about a brewing political crisis there. Several visitors dropped by, including a pencil-thin, dour man from Glencore who grew more dour still when I was introduced as a journalist.
Calil was born in the Nigerian town of Kano, where his Lebanese parents settled in the 1920s. George Calil had prospered in Africa through a small business empire that was based on the cultivation of peanuts (for consumption and groundnut oil) but also included aluminum and small manufacturing. At an early age, Ely was sent to Lebanon and was privately educated there and in Europe. After his father died of stomach cancer in 1966, Ely—who has five sisters and a younger brother—was chosen to return to Nigeria and restructure the family business. He established close connections with government officials, becoming especially friendly with the transportation minister. At the time Nigeria was looking for a firm to help its hajj pilgrims get to Mecca; during one meeting the minister asked Calil if he knew anyone at Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines. He said: “The joke of it was that my brother-in-law’s sister was going out with a guy who was high up in the MEA hierarchy. She later married him. So I went to Beirut and met his boss, who was very interested. ‘Do you really know the minister?’ he wanted to know. He made a huge proposal, and at the end Middle East Airlines got a lot of business and Nigeria was able to transport out its hajj pilgrims in style. We had been making a few hundred thousand dollars here and there, but on this deal alone I made a few million dollars. I thought: ‘Screw crushing peanuts to make oil.’ This was as easy as putting two people together who needed each other.”
Later, his friend became the minister of telecommunications, and he asked Calil to recruit companies to invest in Nigeria. “I learned a lot from him; he was very clever,” Calil said. He recounted how he once had the minister at his home in Nigeria, along with an English businessman who was seeking a contract to lay telephone cables. By way of denigrating his chief competitor, a Japanese firm, the Englishman talked about having been tortured during World War II at a Japanese POW camp.
“As he was talking, the minister started taking off his tie, and then his jacket, and then his shirt—and there were whip marks on his back, scars. ‘You know who gave these to me?’ he asked. ‘Two British police who arrested me when we were fighting for our independence. And you know what? I don’t bear a grudge. I’ll do business with the British as long as you give me the right price. So don’t give me your political propaganda, just give me a good contract.”
After the first OPEC oil shock, in 1973, Calil became seriously involved in the petroleum business, first trading oil and then obtaining concessions and reselling them. Within five years, oil had become the largest sector of his business. Calil’s influence and wealth soared after the Nigerian general Ibrahim Babangida assumed power in a 1985 coup. When I asked Calil about his relationship with Babangida, who is still a power broker in Nigeria, he acknowledged that they were close friends. “I took his kids on holidays and to stay with me in London,” he said. “He saw me as a sound independent adviser, not a sycophant. He asked me to handle a lot of back-channel communications, and he sent me out as an adviser to other African governments.” But Babangida was forced out in the face of popular protests in 1993 and ceded power to a civilian government. Three months later, after Sani Abacha took power; his regime earned worldwide condemnation by hanging an activist named Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other democracy campaigners. Base Petroleum, a firm of Calil’s that owned several oil concessions in Nigeria, paid Washington lobbyist Robert Cabelly nearly four hundred thousand dollars between mid-1996 and early 1997 to lobby the Clinton administration on Abacha’s behalf.
Gilbert Chagoury, a key fixer who is also of Lebanese descent, worked in tandem with Calil in Nigeria. He was especially close to Abacha and received oil concessions and large-scale government construction contracts during his rule. Cabelly, Calil, and Chagoury met with a number of senior Clinton administration officials, including Susan Rice, who then served on Clinton’s National Security Council and later as Barack Obama’s UN ambassador and national security adviser. During the lobbying campaign, Chagoury contributed $460,000 to a Miami-based voter registration group that was tied to the Democratic National Committee. In December 1996, he and Calil attended a White House holiday dinner with President Clinton for top Democratic National Committee donors. “We were getting traction, and we said we could bring him [Abacha] around,” Calil recalled. “But in the end he went off the rails, and we had to walk away. It didn’t matter what you did or how much you paid, you couldn’t gloss over the reality.”
Abacha, who funneled several billion dollars into Swiss accounts during his years in power, died in 1998 (reportedly in the company of two prostitutes). Several years later a newly elected Nigerian government identified Chagoury as a key financial intermediary for Abacha. According to a Wall Street Journal account, Chagoury cut a deal in which he returned as much as $300 million to the Nigerian government in exchange for a written agreement that he would not be prosecuted. He still could have faced prosecution in several European countries, but that threat was preempted when the island state of St. Lucia named him as its ambassador to UNESCO, which gave Chagoury diplomatic immunity. Chagoury later made a comeback in Nigeria, and by the mid-2000s was again receiving major construction projects. Ironically, his chief backer was identified in news accounts as Ahmed Tinubu, a former governor who had made his name in politics as an anti-Abacha activist. His financial arrangements with Chagoury were not disclosed, but a local magazine reported that Tinubu had recently flown to Paris on Chagoury’s private plane.
Chagoury has a mansion in the Los Angeles area and also had plenty of powerful friends in the United States. He’s one of the biggest donors (between $1 million and $5 million) to the Clintons’ foundation and appears to be a close friend of Bill’s. Chagoury helped arrange a $100,000 speaking engagement for Bill Clinton, and in 2006 attended his sixtieth birthday party and, the following year, his aide Douglas Band’s wedding in France.
Following the election in 1999 of Olusegun Obasanjo, who had been jailed for speaking out against the human rights abuses and corruption of the Abacha regime, Calil’s influence in Nigeria waned. (Although when in power, Obasanjo headed a government that proved pervasively corrupt itself.) But by then his scope of operations had expanded enormously. He became a confidant to Denis Sassou Nguesso, who had taken power in a 1997 civil war in the nearby Republic of the Congo. “Calil became the country’s main oil adviser,” said Philippe Vasset, of Africa Energy Intelligence. “All the traders courted him in order to get contracts.”
Calil served as a personal adviser to Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade, who won office in 2000.5 Calil had befriended Wade when the latter was living in exile in Paris. He provided Wade with an apartment, introduced him to French government officials, and generally promoted him in political and media circles. Wade’s base of operations while in exile was at the Paris offices of Saga Petroleum, a small Norwegian firm run by a friend of Calil’s.
Calil also became the chief oil adviser to Idriss Deby, a warlord who had seized power in 1990 (and still holds it) in Chad. He was tasked with recruiting oil companies to develop projects in that country, and he himself, in conjunction with Eronat, landed a huge exploration concession there roughly the size of Texas. In 2003, the two men sold a major stake in the concession to China in a deal sealed, according to a report in the London Evening Standard, at a celebratory banquet thrown at Eronat’s estate in Chelsea.
“You’d have an African head of state who would want advice—they all wanted oil to happen in their country,” Calil explained to me of his work on the continent. “Of course you offered the advice pro bono, but you used that to build your network. Now it’s considered a sin to do that. They’d say, ‘Look at this piece of land and see if it’s worth anything.’ And you’d go to Exxon and get them interested, and you’d sell them a part, and you’d keep the juiciest part of the concession for yourself. Everyone was happy. The president was happy because Exxon was now exploring for oil, Exxon was happy, and you had the heart of the concession. If you hadn’t been there as the catalyst, the thing wouldn’t have happened. You might call it abusing my role. I call it creating entrepreneurial wealth, and I created a lot of wealth.”
When I asked him about his sensitive role as adviser to various African presidents, Calil downplayed the significance: “In Africa, to say ‘thank you’ they give you a diplomatic passport, because you backed their campaign or out of friendship. And then they’ll introduce you in semiofficial circles as their adviser. If I took you to some of these banana republics, on the third visit you’d be appointed as the media adviser. I’ve held the title of adviser, and the diplomatic passport, and I’ve given advice, but I’ve never had a desk at the presidential palace.”
Africa has always been the main focus of Calil’s operations, but he’s done business around the globe. In addition to operations in Russia and the Middle East, he owned a Houston-based firm called Nautilus, which obtained oil and gas concessions in South America and Central Asia. He sold Nautilus to Ocean Energy, which subsequently was bought by Devon Energy, now the largest US-based independent oil and gas producer. Calil also won a gas concession in Brazil, which he later sold to Enron. Calil told me: “When buying and selling oil concessions, you’re dependent on your skills and knowledge, but you’re also very much dependent on the goodwill of the local government, from presidents to ministers. You end up building a political network to a) build up the business and b) protect it.”
Calil’s social and political networks are astonishing in scope. When I traveled to Sudan on a reporting trip, Calil supplied me with a cell phone number for one of the country’s most senior intelligence officials. In Lebanon, I dined with Calil at the mountainside estate of Nayla Moawad, a government minister and powerful Christian politician.6 He is a close friend of Mohammed Al-Saleh, the brother-in-law of King Abdullah II of Jordan, and of a number of Eastern European oligarchs, including the Russian Oleg Deripaska and Alexander Mashkevitch of Kazakhstan, both of whom appear on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s billionaires. “He has the ability to get things done, just about anywhere,” said a former CIA official of his post-agency business dealings with Calil. “We once needed an answer to a question in Syria, which is a very tough place to work. One of his associates talked his way into the deputy foreign minister’s office and got us the information we were looking for.”
Another former CIA officer now in business has also turned to Calil for help from time to time: “I’ve not found the country yet in the Middle East or Africa where we needed help where Ely couldn’t reach out to someone of consequence, from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa to the Gulf to the Levant. Before he does business in the country, he makes sure that he’s got a network in place to safeguard his operations. He knows how to cultivate people with business, financial, political, and intelligence horsepower.”
In the United States, Calil has relationships with both major political parties and contacts at the State Department and the CIA. “The minute you get anywhere in the oil business, the US system becomes interested,” Calil told me. “The embassy invites you over, and the attaché wants to know what you’re doing, and it builds from there. People tell you that you should meet someone, whether to impress you or please you or use you, and then it becomes a chain. There’s nothing sensitive about knowing people; it’s a talent, at the end of the day.”
In Britain, Calil is a friend and longtime business adviser to Lord Archer, the writer and former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. He is also close to Baron Peter Mandelson, a key figure in the British Labour Party and currently secretary of state for business, enterprise, and regulatory reform. Calil’s closest social companions in London include the Syrian-born billionaire Wafic Said, who made his fortune through construction deals in Saudi Arabia and once helped broker a mammoth sale of British warplanes to Riyadh.7
Robin Birley, another close friend, runs an empire of London’s most exclusive private clubs that was founded by his father, the best known of which is Annabel’s. I visited Birley at his apartment on Brampton Square on a cold, cloudy afternoon. He was dressed in a dark sweater and slacks and smoking a cigar on a balcony when I arrived, and after buzzing me into the building, led me to a sitting room on the second floor. Glowing logs were piled high in a fireplace, and two whippets were comfortably situated, one on a sofa, where Birley took a seat, and the other on an armchair. “I hate the man but I love the piece,” Birley said when he saw me admiring a large bust of Lenin on a table next to the fireplace.
Birley’s face was disfigured when as a child he was mauled by a tiger at the private zoo of a family friend; his right eye remains slitted. He met Calil in the 1970s, when the latter was “a core member of the Birley clubs.” In 1986, Birley’s brother Rupert disappeared and apparently drowned while swimming near his home off the coast of Togo; his body was never found. Calil, who was a close friend of Rupert’s, helped organize a search and provided a plane for the effort.
Birley is an ardent conservative: When Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, came to England in 1998 in order to avoid extradition to Spain to face charges for human rights violations, Birley helped coordinate a PR campaign on his behalf and financed his stay at the Wentworth Estate outside of London. But despite knowing Calil for three decades, he said they’d never discussed politics. “I assume he’s conservative, but I don’t really know,” he said as he petted the whippet. “There are certain friends you can talk about anything with. With Ely there’s an upper floor you can’t get to. He’s quite secretive and self-contained. I’ve never seen an outburst.”
As to business, Birley described Calil as “ambitious and restless” and always in search of a big project. “It’s not so much the money; he wants to build something on an imperial scale,” Birley said. “He’s not just an average businessman who buys and sells. He’s more a Roman than a Carthaginian in that sense. He’s a seriously clever man.”
Calil was amused when I later told him what Birley had said about his “imperial” thinking. “Beyond a certain point,” he said with a broad grin, “where you are able to eat and drink and buy a car or two, there has to be something more interesting that motivates you, whether it’s the challenge itself or the end goal.”
Calil has acknowledged being a friend and financial supporter of Severo Moto, the exiled political leader he is accused of seeking to put in power via the attempted 2004 coup in Equatorial Guinea. In return, Calil and others who allegedly backed the overthrow would have been given preferential rights to Equatorial Gunea’s oil reserves by Moto’s government.
The plot unraveled when a plane carrying over sixty mercenaries were arrested in Zimbabwe and charged with attempting to buy weapons for the alleged coup. (The mercenaries initially claimed they were buying the weapons for a mining project in the Democratic Republic of Congo.) A number of the men were extradited to Equatorial Guinea, including Simon Mann, who was also a former British army officer. They were taken to the notorious Black Beach prison, where they were beaten and tortured. Mann, the alleged coup leader, confessed to involvement in the plot and was sentenced to thirty-four years in jail.
In 2009, President Obiang pardoned Mann on “humanitarian grounds.” Obiang is not known for his humanitarian impulses, and there was some suspicion that Mann cut a deal to get released. He was soon back in England singing the praises of dictator Obiang and charging that Calil had been a mastermind of the failed plot.
Calil had once unsuccessfully sought to do business in Equatorial Guinea, but nothing came of his overtures. Whatever happened, he and Obiang became bitter enemies in the aftermath.
He says he met Moto a few years prior to the coup, at a dinner party at a friend’s home in Madrid, and was impressed by his intelligence and struggles against the Obiang regime. “Our whole friendship was built on my listening to his story, not business,” Calil said after we had left Eronat in Paris and flown to Madrid to see Moto. “Sure, you could make money in Equatorial Guinea, and, sure, if Severo was there and the business was there I’d be interested, but that doesn’t allow you to extrapolate and say, therefore, I arranged a coup to put him in power.”
Calil also acknowledged knowing Simon Mann, but he insists he knew nothing about a coup; by his account, Mann was offering only to provide military protection for Moto so he could return to Equatorial Guinea. Obiang has brought suit against Calil over the coup in various countries, including Lebanon and Zimbabwe, and has never won a court victory. In Britain, a judge ruled that Obiang could not even bring a legal case for lack of evidence. “It would have been great fun,” Calil told me. “He accused me of causing him mental trauma, and he would have been forced to come to court for a mental exam. He has tried every angle and opportunity, and lost each time. In the media I’m supposed to be the bad guy but Obiang treats his country as his kingdom and the oil like his private property.” He added, “You had an African dictator and some mercenaries and a shady Arab. It makes for a great novel, but the part of it that wasn’t a novel was tested in court and proven to be wrong. The press has reported a pack of lies.”
Calil stayed at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid, and we met Moto and one of his daughters late one afternoon at the lobby bar, where a pianist played “New York, New York.” Moto was dressed in a black jacket, a lavender shirt, and tasseled loafers; he pulled out typed press statements for my review from a faux leopard-skinned binder. The Spanish government had recently been threatening to force him to leave the country, and he seemed downcast and depressed, aware that any chance he had once had of ruling Equatorial Guinea was quickly and irreversibly slipping away. “For many years I had very good and important friends in Spain that helped me financially and politically, but the government has cut off all that help,” he told me, as he drank a Coca-Cola with a slice of lemon. “Fortunately, God put Ely in my path. Every time I have asked Ely for support, he has responded.”
But Moto denied he and Calil ever talked about a coup or that he discussed overthrowing Obiang during his conversations with Simon Mann. “I was told he [Mann] had great capacity in providing personal protection,” he said.
“I presented my plan to him to return to Equatorial Guinea and my fear that Obiang would assassinate me. He assured me that he would be able to offer protection if I returned, but he never said anything about a coup d’état. We never discussed that.”
At this point Calil interjected: “Yes, Severo was going in, and he needed to be accompanied … But it was only to accompany him home; it was not to stage a coup. Simon Mann wouldn’t even know how to take his own mother to the ball.”
In recent years, the global energy business has changed in ways that have reduced somewhat the clout of the middleman. Following the expansion of antibribery laws, a number of companies and fixers have been tried for their illegal payoffs to foreign officials. In addition to the Halliburton case involving Jack Stanley and Jeffrey Tesler, the oil services company Baker Hughes paid a $33 million fine after admitting it had bribed officials in Angola, Russia, and other countries. Willbros Group, another oil services company, was found to have paid off numerous foreign officials to win overseas deals, in one case delivering $1 million in a suitcase. Such judgments have made companies more wary of fixers and more eager to find other means of securing political support. One especially popular technique has been to partner with a local company that is owned by a president, or oil minister, or some other top official that needs to be appeased.
Oil-rich states have grown a bit more sophisticated, too, further lessening the utility of middlemen. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, such newly formed oil producers as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan had no experience whatsoever with international business. Russia was hardly better off, and so fixers like Calil and Eronat were able to get in early and serve as important oil exporters from the country. “Everyone was using everyone,” Calil told me of that time. “The Russians were using you because they didn’t have the capital or the knowledge. You were using the Russians because you needed a local partner. But then the Russians acquired the knowledge and the money, so they no longer need you anymore.”
In West Africa, after decades of poverty, deficient education, and repressive rule, many governments were staffed entirely by untrained apparatchiks who had no idea how to interact in the business arena. But during the 2000s, year after year of ever-rising oil prices prompted many oil nations to become savvier about their resources and more inclined to deal with corporations directly.
Fixers remain a permanent presence in the oil markets, however, and for good reason. Even with prices dropping in the current slowdown, a worldwide scramble for oil is still under way, with the United States and China as the two major competitors. Companies are always looking for an advantage, and often the right fixer can be the means to gain it. “There’s no way one company can act clean, especially if you’re worrying about what the Chinese and Koreans are going to do,” Edward Chow, the former Chevron executive, told me. “And to be fair, if you’re working for a Chinese or Indian oil company, and you’re trying to get into a country or region where the Americans or British or French have been forever, how do you think you’re going to get in?” Furthermore, oil companies today tend to be capital-rich but opportunity-poor: They have plenty of money, but there are fewer fields and concessions available, and much of what’s out there is controlled by national oil companies. So the stakes are higher and the desperation to get in is greater. “The fundamental drivers behind the use of fixers are so strong that it’s hard to imagine the practice is going to go away,” Chow said.
Calil agrees, in characteristically blunt terms. “There’s no way to do business in the Third World without enriching government leaders,” he told me. “You used to give a dictator a suitcase of dollars; now you give a tip on your stock shares, or buy a housing estate from his uncle or mother for ten times its worth.” Because of this inevitability, Calil sees the West’s strict antibribery laws as fundamentally misguided. “If you want to end corruption, you have to become the policeman of the world, and put in prison—in America—the Obiangs and Dos Santoses. But the businessman has no choice but to do what those guys want. He’s between the devil and the deep blue sea. The Chinese are coming to Africa and promising 25 percent for concessions. So what do you do? Say the US government doesn’t approve? The Chinese will give you the finger … No one looks forward to paying bribes. It’s no joke, and it’s coming out of [the fixer’s] pocket, not yours or Uncle Sam’s. But if you have to do it, you have to do it.”
Calil has oil interests still, but he has diversified into a broader range of industries. He spends more and more of his time “managing my investments,” among them interests in the emerging field of carbon trading: buying the rights to pollute from cleaner businesses and selling them to dirtier ones. A firm he is involved with had struck deals in China and India, and Calil was traveling regularly to both nations on the company’s behalf, hoping to establish business ties and build political support. It was an ironic turn indeed that Ely Calil, who grew so rich off the excesses of the carbon era, should now stand to profit still more from the long struggle to clean them up.