To know a person, you talk to him or her; to know a country, you visit the place; and to know a religion, you study sacred texts. But oil defies these forms of interrogation, writes Peter Maass in the intro to ‘Crude World: The violent twilight of oil’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com). “It is a commodity that is extracted, refined, shipped and poured into your gas tank with few people seeing it. It has no voice, body, army or dogma of its own. It is invisible most of the time, but, like gravity, it influences everything we do.”
The author’s journeys to ‘coax secrets from a liquid’ take him to many places, including Equatorial Guinea, where he discovers that the plunder at the transactional level and the how of an oil firm funnelling a bribe to a president can be studied by looking into the affairs of Abayak S.A., a mysterious company widely believed to be owned by the president, Teodoro Obiang. Among examples of how ‘American companies slipped money into Obiang’s already bulging pockets’ is a snatch from the book about Marathon negotiating “a deal to purchase land from Abayak for more than $2 million; a partial payment was executed with a cheque for $611,000 made out to Obiang himself. Marathon was involved in a joint venture to operate two natural gas plants with GEOGAM, an obscure company in which Abayak held a 75 per cent stake. And so on…”
Weak defence
To those who wonder how American companies defend their dealings with Obiang, an instructive section in the book discusses the Senate hearing at which senior executives of Riggs Bank, and oil companies testified. When, for instance, Lawrence Hebert, president and chief executive of Riggs, blamed the absence of ‘suspicious activity reports’ – which are supposed to be submitted to regulators when large cash payments are made – on a sub-par computer system, Senator Carl Levin had this to say: “Mr Hebert, you don’t need a computer system to realise suspicious activity when you’ve got sixty pounds of cash there being walked into the door with a suitcase.”
The defence from Andrew Swiger of ExxonMobil – that the business arrangements were entirely commercial – was packed with rhetoric: “They are a function of completing the work that we are there to do, which is to develop the country’s petroleum resources and, through that and our work in the community, make Equatorial Guinea a better place.”
Fretting that one of oil’s darkly magical properties is that it erases inconvenient memories, Maass informs that the ‘new’ embassy building of the US in Malabo, the country’s capital, was leased from the minister of national security, Manuel Nguema Mba, the uncle of the president. Which meant, the US government, like Exxon and Marathon, was putting money into the pocket of the presidential family, the author rues. “Yet the most appalling twist was that the State Department and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights had documented a case in which Nguema Mba had supervised the torture of a political opponent. An alleged torturer was receiving $17,500 in monthly rent from US taxpayers…”
Depressing read that can make you desert your gas-fed car and go walking, instead.
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