1 Or at least that’s what he told me. By other accounts he was born in Germany, Austria, Turkey, or New Orleans.
2 Norway is considered one of the cleanest countries, but during the past decade Statoil, the state oil company, was caught paying bribes through middlemen to win major contracts, once in Iran and again in Libya. “Statoil offered the Iranians social programs, infrastructure, all sorts of benefits in exchange for the deal there, but the Iranians wanted money,” said one person familiar with the arrangements. “The locals were not interested in the alternatives, and other competitors were happy to offer payments, so Statoil did what everyone else was doing: They used agents to make payments, and they did it in a ham-handed way and got caught.”
3 The Senate report includes a memo that Citibank’s Alain Ober, a private banking officer who handled Bongo’s account, sent to several colleagues:
I never asked our client where his money came from. My guess … is that in view of the importance of our client’s country as a provider of cheap oil to France, it was (and still is) important that our client stayed in power and thus the French government/French oil companies (Elf) made “donations” to him (very much like we give to PACs in the US!).
4 He sold Sloane House that year to Sir Anthony Bamford, chairman of a global construction-equipment firm, for an estimated £30 million (approximately $48 million).
5 Wade was voted out in 2012, leaving office amid widespread charges of corruption.
6 She is the widow of former president René Moawad, who was assassinated in a 1989 car bombing likely orchestrated by Syria.
7 In 1981, his ten-year-old son drowned in a swimming pool at the home of Prince Sultan Al-Saud. A fictionalized account of that story is told in the film Syriana.
1 Based on subsequent revelations about corruption in his country, Obiang’s wealth surely stands in the billions by now.
2 Despite the US government’s public commitment to keeping corrupt foreign officials out of the country, it 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 the sources, officials from Cambodia, Kenya, and Nigeria.
3 In 2009, Jefferson was sentenced to thirteen years in prison on counts that included bribery and conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Several of the charges were related to his efforts to help companies win oil concessions in Equatorial Guinea.
4 A Texas oilman named William Lee founded Triton. He ran the firm until 1993, when charges surfaced that it had won favor in Indonesia by bribing government officials. Triton ultimately paid a $300,000 fine to settle the charges but denied any wrongdoing. The company then called Amerada Hess (it changed its name to Hess Corporation in 2006) bought Triton in 2001, primarily to acquire its Equatorial Guinea stake.
5 Levinson later represented the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group that led the push for the American invasion of Iraq on the basis of phony allegations about Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda.
6 Wihbey’s Institute was based in Israel, which of course had particular reasons to push the US away from Middle Eastern oil suppliers.
7 Riggs, which also did extensive business with former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, was later hit with a $16 million fine for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. It was subsequently sold to PNC Financial Services.
8 The Senate report also showed that oil companies paid for scholarships at American universities that went to children of Equatorial Guinea’s leaders. The oil companies apparently still offer scholarship funding for Obiang relatives who attend universities in South Africa. ExxonMobil, Hess, and Marathon pay for clan members to attend universities in Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Cape Town, according to a Spanish academic who interviewed numerous Equatoguinean students in those cities. The academic did not know how much money the oil companies provided, but the students clearly lived well. This person met a nephew of Obiang’s who rented an apartment at a luxury shopping mall in Pretoria and was known for his constant parties.
9 Berger and Nagler were outed as Teodorin’s helpers in a 2010 Senate report, but even after that he was able to employ Americans to help him handle his financial and corporate affairs. At least until mid-2012 Teodorin retained the services of a little-known Los Angeles area accountant named James McCaleb. According to his Web site, McCaleb—who operates out of a business center in Pasadena and also has an office in Honolulu—and his firm help clients “concentrate all of your resources on what matters most; increasing revenues and reducing taxes.” McCaleb serves as a director for several limited liability companies he incorporated for Teodorin—whose name does not appear anywhere on corporate records—including Malibu Estate Management LLC and Beautiful Vision. Teodorin’s American financial wizard didn’t have a stellar record when it came to his own finances. McCaleb filed for bankruptcy in 2008, listing debts of around $900,000, mostly to credit card companies, and savings of only $1,000 and $100 “cash on hand.” McCaleb settled with his creditors in 2009 after receiving court-ordered credit counseling.
10 Various members of the Jackson family have done well from their acquaintance with Teodorin. Michael’s brother, Marlon Jackson, reportedly visited Equatorial Guinea at his invitation to discuss potential agricultural deals.
11 In 2011, Davis ended his relationship with the Obiang regime and sued Equatorial Guinea after the government stiffed him for almost $142,000 worth of fees and expenses.
1 Volatility in 2012 was far less dramatic, but prices still ranged from a low of $90 per barrel to a high of $125, which by historical standards is still a lot of movement.
2 Of course, as Glencore grew it traded more and more commodities, but even at the time of the IPO, its oil trading division was the company’s most profitable.
3 Like others, he would talk only on the condition that I not reveal his name.
4 International sanctions did not ban fuel sales to Damascus at the time, so they were not illegal, but they came amid calls by the US and some European governments for a boycott on energy deals with Syria.
5 In the US, freewheeling speculation in oil has its roots in the waning days of the Clinton administration. In December 2000 the president signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill contained a provision, which came to be known as the Enron Loophole, that created a regulatory exemption for oil and “energy products” under the primary law regulating derivatives. Then senator Phil Gramm was the leading force behind this piece of legislation. His wife, Wendy Gramm, who served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under George W. Bush, pushed through rules that further eased regulation of energy speculation, and then took a job on Enron’s board.
6 Glencore continued to do business with Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, and in recent years has been a regular supplier of gasoline to the country. It halted deliveries in late 2009 under pressure from the US government.
7 Clinton pardoned Green as well. In 2009, Green lived in Jerusalem and had a fortune of $1.2 billion, according to Forbes magazine, which ranked him no. 601 on its annual list of the world’s richest people.
8 Cohen denies that they were undervalued.
9 Gertler’s spokesman, Cohen, told me that his client had “never been personally engaged in business enterprises with Glencore.” This turned out to be a rather flimsy distinction, for Cohen acknowledged that Gertler is “an adviser” to a private consulting company called Fleurette, registered in Gibraltar and “owned by a trust for the benefit of the Gertler family.” Fleurette happens to have a “long-standing business relationship with Glencore.”
1 Directly behind Cambodia were Pakistan (thirty-seven cents an hour), Vietnam (thirty-eight cents), and Sri Lanka (forty-three cents). China, with wages of between fifty-five and eighty cents per hour in inland areas, was the ninth cheapest.
2 The conventional wisdom in the US, among government officials, academics, and pundits, is that wages in the Third World are as high as they need to be. “Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about ‘labor standards,’ I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote back in 2008, in his inimitable prose style that resembles nothing so much as a den mother addressing a troop of Brownies. “The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn … Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.” For families living in the dump, “a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty,” and attempts by Obama to push for “living wages” for apparel workers in the Third World would merely ratchet up production costs for industry and lead to factory shutdowns and layoffs. “The central challenge in the poorest countries,” he wrote, “is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.” Incidentally, Kristof’s speakers bureau, APB, says his typical fee is approximately $30,000. Hence, for an hour during which he offers “a compassionate glimpse” into global poverty and gives a “voice to the voiceless,” as his APB profile puts it, Kristof pockets what a Cambodian apparel worker would make in about fifty years.
3 Sciaroni discussed the general political situation in Cambodia during our interview in Phnom Penh, but he declined to reply to subsequent questions about Iran–Contra and CALG or his current business or political activities.
4 A peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas was concluded in 1992, but the following year the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly, dominated by right-wing parties, adopted a blanket amnesty law that shielded all military and guerrilla forces from prosecution for human rights abuses committed during the war. In 1999, a report issued by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that discussed El Salvador’s failure to prosecute those responsible for the Jesuits’ massacre called the amnesty bill a violation of international law.
5 Foreign companies frequently make donations for “social” projects as a means of winning favor with senior officials. Cambodian government records show that in 2010 BHP donated an undisclosed amount of money to Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit, Battalion E70, allegedly for humanitarian aid to the poor. In 2009, in a ceremony marking its fifteenth anniversary, Hun Sen described E70 as having made a “great contribution to the protection of national sovereignty and security of the people, and to the prevention of social unrests and terrorism.” E70’s true record is decidedly less benign. In 1997, opposition politician Sam Rainsy and about two hundred supporters gathered in a park across the street from the National Assembly in Phnom Penh to protest judicial corruption. A 1999 report by Human Rights Watch said:
In a well-planned attack, four grenades were thrown into the crowd, killing protesters and bystanders, including children, and blowing limbs off street vendors. An FBI investigation concluded that Cambodian government officials were responsible for the attack. On the day of the grenade attack, Prime Minister Hun Sen’s personal bodyguard unit, [Brigade E70], was, for the first time, deployed at a demonstration. The elite military unit, in full riot gear, not only failed to prevent the attack, but was seen by numerous witnesses opening up its lines to allow the grenade-throwers to escape and threatening to shoot people trying to pursuing the attackers.
No one was ever punished for the attack, and E70 has allegedly been involved in subsequent abuses, among them at natural resource concessions.
6 Though in January 2014 large protests, led by apparel workers, erupted in Phnom Penh, posing the first serious challenge to Hun Sen since he took power. His regime reacted in typical fashion: the violent eviction of protesters from a public square, a ban on all public gatherings, and security forces attacking striking workers, killing at least four of them. Opposition to Hun Sen had been brewing since the previous July, when his party claimed victory in elections that were widely seen as badly flawed. Two months later opposition leaders began threatening large strikes and protests, which Sciaroni dismissed. A September 2013 story in the Cambodia Daily said that, in Sciaroni’s opinion, “savvy investors” would not be disturbed by strikes or protests. “Investors like political stability,” he told the newspaper. “That has been a selling point for Cambodia.”
1 “Embassy monitors, who have attended nearly every session over the past year, have never seen her present in Parliament,” the cable said.
2 Some five years later, Karimova launched a new line of attack in her charm offensive by bringing Sting to Uzbekistan for a concert and to accompany her to a “cultural festival” she sponsored. When attacked by critics, Sting, who was reportedly paid as much as $3 million for the trip, defended himself by saying that UNICEF had cosponsored the concert, which turned out to be false, and that while he was “well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights,” he went to Uzbekistan anyway, because he had “come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counterproductive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art.” The statement didn’t specify whether Sting reached that conclusion before or after he cashed his check.
3 Papers found in Tripoli after Gaddafi’s overthrow showed that Blair had even offered advice to his son Saif Gaddafi, now wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, on his PhD thesis for the London School of Economics, “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratization of Global Governance Institutions.”
4 There is zero evidence that Blair ever pushed Gaddafi to “reform” Libya’s system. Evidence found in Tripoli after the dictator’s fall shows that he was unfailingly polite with Gaddafi during their meetings and focused on business.
5 Blair’s complex corporate setup “was done on legal and accountancy advice to preserve confidentiality, not to avoid tax as is sometimes maliciously suggested,” spokeswoman Grant says.
6 The Kuwaitis have a long history of rewarding their friends against Saddam Hussein. They contributed heavily to the presidential library of George Bush Sr., the architect of Gulf War I, and various Bush family members and former administration officials won deals in Kuwait soon after that conflict.
7 This isn’t the first time that Nazarbayev has used a Western intermediary to assemble a team of spin doctors to market his regime. Back in the late 1990s he spent $4 million to hire American lobbyists and PR consultants, among them Mark Siegel, a former Democratic National Committee executive director, and Michael Deaver, a deputy chief of staff to President Reagan. That team was put together by James Giffen (see Chapter One), an American business consultant who funneled tens of millions of dollars to Nazarbayev out of fees Giffen received from oil companies that won stakes in Kazakh oil fields. During the same time, Gerald Carmen, a former US representative to the United Nations in Geneva under Ronald Reagan, was paid more than $1 million to help “establish President Nazarbayev as one of the foremost emerging leaders of the New World.” As further thanks, Nazarbayev gifted Carmen a tasseled cap and a decorative whip.
8 David Plouffe, a former senior aide to Barack Obama, was paid fifty thousand dollars (from a pro-government group) for a speech he gave in Azerbaijan in 2009. After receiving a wave of criticism from local Azeri groups, he donated his fee to an organization promoting democracy in the region.
9 The USLBA seamlessly transitioned into the post-Gaddafi era after the colonel was overthrown in 2011. Its Web site deleted all references to him, and not long after his downfall, carried news about the arrival in the US for “urgent medical care” of two dozen wounded Libyan fighters. Never mind that they were wounded fighting the government of the association’s former pal, Gaddafi.
1 They were outlawed earlier most everywhere else. Texas barred their use in 1969 and California in the mid-1960s.
2 Nor was Exxon’s cause helped by Mark Krohn, the company’s environmental consultant and witness, who was decimated by Stuart Smith, Grefer’s attorney, on cross-examination. In addition to demonstrating that Krohn’s company did a less-than-thorough job of examining Grefer’s property in concluding that there was not much damage to it, Smith elicited from Krohn that his undergraduate degree in general science came from the University of the State of New York, an unaccredited institution where he took correspondence courses while in the navy; that he had dropped out of the New York State Maritime Academy because, he confessed, “I was spending too much time having too much fun,” and that the certification he had won for having completed a course in the transportation of radioactive materials had been issued by his own company. “Please let the record reflect that the snickering and chortling that you and your expert consultant are doing in response to some of Mr. Krohn’s answers are distracting, unprofessional, and uncalled for,” Exxon’s attorney told Smith at one particularly painful moment for Krohn.
3 Chris John heads LMOGA. Before taking the reins there he was a member of the House in the Louisiana legislature and the US Congress, and then a lobbyist at Ogilvy Government Relations in Washington, “serving the firm’s clients in matters dealing primarily with energy legislation in Congress,” according to his bio.
4 Which was not very well at all. In one typical exchange the interviewer asked me how important global warming was to the Obama administration and what sort of initiatives might it unveil in Durban. I’m recalling this from memory, but my rough reply was, “This issue is very important to the administration. I’d say that the administration considers it to be one of the most important issues it faces. I’d expect some very important initiatives at the conference.”
5 The industry and its local allies in government claim that “basic reasons for coastal land loss” include natural causes such as “wave erosion” and human action, such as “the construction of a variety of devices that regulate water and sediment deposition,” as one state Web site puts it. But a 2003 US Geological Survey study estimated that oil and gas operations are responsible for at least a third of Louisiana’s coastal erosion, and others have placed the figure at closer to half.
6 Long used oil for self-enrichment, too. In 1934, he and James Noe, a senator and independent oilman, formed the Win or Lose Oil Company, which was secretly awarded leases on state-owned lands that were then subleased to major oil companies. Noe and various cronies and Long family members made big profits through Win or Lose. Huey did too, though he used most of his take to further his political purposes.
7 It was the type of public service reporting that virtually no newspaper in America will now undertake, and certainly no midsize newspaper. The Times-Picayune itself now publishes three days a week, leaving New Orleans the largest US city without a daily newspaper.
8 Mind you, this was the Reagan era, and not a particularly tough period of EPA enforcement. Anne Gorsuch headed the EPA until she was fired in 1983 after being cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over records on federal waste disposal practices. She had slashed its budget by 22 percent, hacked away at environmental regulations, and proposed establishing a 30-by-40-mile rectangle of ocean off the Delaware-Maryland coast where incinerator ships could burn toxic wastes.
9 Short answer: Probably not.
10 Edwards, a legendary rogue, was elected four times, thrice prior to his defeat of Roemer. He is perhaps best known for a line he uttered while campaigning against incumbent governor Dave Treen in 1983: “The only way I can lose this election is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” He also said Treen was so dumb it took him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes.
11 After he won his case, Doré hired a journalist to write a book called Do the Right Thing. Jones sprinkled our conversation with that phrase, which after a while felt like a practiced line that he has probably used many times in court.
12 Morrell himself has received generous support from the oil industry.
13 He and two other armed men broke into a home in Baton Rouge, tied up a person in the house, and tried to get forty-five hundred dollars that Brackin said had been stolen from him, according to state district court records.
14 In 1996, Foster named Jindal secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
15 There are such statutes in many states, which Haynie had described to me as an accepted means of “preventing the big guy from transferring his negligence to the little guy.”
16 Miguez, who’s seen the yacht, described it as “top of the line, the difference in a boat between a Cadillac and a limousine.”
17 The measure also required that future awards be used to clean up the damaged property. That requirement is hard to gainsay; the Corbello verdict did not require that Shell’s money be used to clean up the landowner’s property, and it wasn’t.
18 Veron arranged the private room at Sullivan’s and picked up the tab for him and his colleagues. I paid for my food and drink.
19 In which Hooker Chemical, later bought by Occidental Petroleum, secretly buried twenty-one thousand tons of toxic waste at Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York.
20 Much of this following section is drawn from “Revisiting RCRA’s Oilfield Waste Exemption as to Certain Hazardous Oilfield Exploration and Production Wastes,” a 2003 article by James Cox in the Villanova Environmental Law Journal.
21 Johnston, who was an ardent champion of both the CERCLA and RCRA exemptions, has shaped the modern energy industry as much as any single individual. He served in the Louisiana legislature between 1964 and 1972, and then in the US Senate until 1997, including an eight-year stretch as chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In Louisiana, Johnston once said, a politician could take a range of political positions, but “you got to be pro–oil and gas” His two major legislative achievements were transformative. He was the key Democratic author of 1978 legislation that eliminated price ceilings on natural gas and slashed federal regulation of interstate gas sales, and also a chief advocate for a 1995 bill that greatly expanded deepwater drilling and reduced federal royalty payments on it. On his retirement, he formed Johnston & Associates with his son Hunter Johnston, and the two have lobbied for energy interests ever since. His other post-Senate affiliations include membership on the Chevron board and policy adviser to the Heartland Institute, a clearinghouse for climate change denial information heavily funded by oil companies. As of 2013 the eighty-year-old Johnston was still at it: the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by him opposing tighter regulation of natural gas in which he said, “The free market might not always lead to everyone’s definition of the sweet spot, but experience has shown that it is a better allocator and regulator than bureaucrats and politicians.”
1 He is a director of the former and non-executive chairman of the latter.