The Squeeze: Oil, Money and Greed in the 21st Century. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ 1992 Shell’s 5,000 Nigerian staff, 20,000 contractors and 270 expatriate staff had rebuilt most of the wells, replaced equipment destroyed during the war and sought to compensate for losses. But, in the rush for oil, Shell applied standards that would have been unacceptable in Europe or America. Toxic gas was flared from the wells, and oil spills, seeping across farmland and rivers, remained untreated. Nevertheless, only one million barrels of oil a day, half of Nigeria’s capacity, was produced, and even that was affected by corruption. Every year the company’s auditors arrived from Europe to unearth endemic corruption among the company’s local employees. Systematically, some of Shell’s Nigeria managers gave contracts to friends and received backhanders, or paid inflated invoices and pocketed the cash. The auditors found hefty sums paid for ‘travel expenses’ to politicians and government officials and their families. Usually the same expenses were also paid by the government, and the officials kept the difference. At the top level, vast sums of money received from Shell in royalties and taxes were diverted by Nigeria’s politicians and officials to private offshore bank accounts. Brian Lavers, Shell’s country chairman until 1991, had been under pressure to pay bribes to government officials and local chiefs. To avoid participating in any illegal activity, Shell’s board agreed to pay middlemen, farmers and tribal chiefs as ‘consultants’ and for ‘services’ to build social amenities including schools, roads and cinemas. Beyond the company’s control, these were constructed for inflated prices, allowing Shell’s local managers and their friends to steal considerable sums of money. Despite his equally fierce opposition to the Nigerian government’s corruption, Philip Watts, Lavers’s successor, had no alternative but to reluctantly agree under pressure in 1991 to expand Shell’s operation in the country. The company increased the number of rigs searching for oil from seven to 22, agreed to pay higher royalties and, critically, agreed in return for a bonus to increase the country’s officially registered oil reserves from 16 billion barrels to 25 billion barrels. ‘I arrived in this job,’ said Watts, ‘absolutely determined to make a difference on issues I felt strongly about. You’re talking to someone who was in the eye of the storm.’

      Bureaucracy, inflation, ageing equipment, pollution and soaring taxes amid general lawlessness were just part of Watts’s inheritance. Watts, a seismologist, had worked in Borneo, the Gulf of Mexico, the North Sea and Holland before arriving in Nigeria. Intelligent and opinionated, he was intolerant of those he disdained, not least the local criminals. Oil had turned Nigeria into a magnet for villainy. In the Niger delta, 40,000 square miles of swamps and creeks where the Niger flows into the Atlantic, gangs of Ogoni tribesmen were systematically drilling into Shell’s pipelines to divert up to 80,000 barrels of oil every day into barges moored on the creeks. The cargoes were sold to untraceable tankers, chartered by European traders, anchored in the delta or offshore and resold to uninquisitive refineries, especially in nearby Ghana. The European traders could also be the victims. Lured by a succession of telephone calls, a Glencore representative arrived in Nigeria carrying a suitcase filled with several million dollars in cash to buy oil. After the suitcase was handed over, the ‘sellers’ disappeared. If that misfortune gave Watts wry amusement, the Ogoni gangs’ activities caused headaches. Explosions while siphoning oil caused numerous deaths, and the thefts from pipelines caused spillage across farmland and in rivers. The environmental damage placed Shell under pressure to pay compensation to farmers, which in turn encouraged some of them to sabotage pipes in order to claim compensation. Attempts by Watts to crack down on corruption, theft and sabotage endangered Shell’s employees. Increasingly, they could only work if protected by armed militias. Continued civil unrest forced many oil wells to close down. 2,470 security officers were employed to protect the operational staff. Although Shell’s directors in Holland condemned the use of guns as ‘intolerable’, the nature of the corruption in Nigeria left no alternative.

      ‘There’s a staggering skimming of government funds paid straight into Swiss bank accounts,’ Watts exploded. Since each Shell ‘country’ was self-financing for expansion, Watts’s ambitions were frustrated by the government’s refusal to pay Nigeria’s share of the bill. Most of the $7 billion received every year by the government in taxes and royalties simply disappeared. Hundreds of millions of dollars which the government was contractually obliged to contribute to develop new reserves had been deposited in Swiss bank accounts by corrupt officials. A succession of ministers, Watts discovered, had ‘not only stolen the eggs but refused to even feed the goose’. In the face of wholesale corruption, even Nigeria’s banks refused Shell’s requests for loans and overdrafts. Watts’s predicament was complicated in December 1993 by a military coup led by General Sani Abacha and the slump of Nigerian oil prices to $12. The new dictator repressed striking protestors and arrested the trade unions’ leaders in the oilfields, but failed to address Shell’s complaints. Exasperated, Watts threatened the minister of finance and the governor of the central bank. ‘If we can’t pay wages or finance our development,’ he warned, ‘I’ll make sure it’ll be in the press. Even my driver will be protesting in the street.’ Talking tough appealed to Watts, although the corporation’s conflict of interests – eagerness for more oil, collaboration with corrupt rulers, disregard for tribal sensitivities and discounting the social damage caused by the oil spillages – could not be disguised during an international protest.

      In 1990, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a 49-year-old writer and poet, launched a campaign outside Nigeria on behalf of the Ogoni tribe, who inhabited 1.3 per cent of the oil-rich delta and produced 1.5 per cent of Nigeria’s oil. After 30 years of oil production, the Ogonis’ farmland, water and air were polluted by oil spillages and the ‘acid rain’ produced from the gas flaring above their crops and villages. In compensation, they received little income from the oil royalties. With Shell’s knowledge, central government ministers refused to remit even the agreed 1 per cent of the revenue to the locality, and national politicians never visited the region. Until he extended his campaign against the Nigerian government to America and Europe, Saro-Wiwa’s efforts had been fruitless. But the crusade and his encouragement of an armed uprising in the delta altered Shell’s relationship with the government. The Biafran experience had taught the company that any interference with oil revenues, or any demand for secession, would be squashed.

      To protect Shell’s oilfields, Watts felt justified in appealing to the government for protection from constant vandalism. ‘We’re not a bottomless pit of money,’ he explained. Although the uprising was wrecking Shell’s operations in Ogoniland, only 3 per cent of the company’s worldwide production was threatened. During 1993, as the disturbances increased, Watts requested the support of 1,400 armed policemen, in return for which he would provide logistics and welfare. At the company’s expense, ‘mobile police’ armed with AK-47 rifles, some of whose uniforms bore Shell’s insignia, were dispatched as an ‘oilfield protection force’ to the delta. As reports of death and destruction in Ogoni villages reached Europe and America, Shell was accused of financing ‘kill and go mobs’ to brutally suppress the uprising. Amid chaotic scenes, Shell withdrew its staff and stopped pumping oil. The Ogonis would claim that on 1 December 1993 Watts thanked the inspector general of the police for his cooperation ‘in helping to preserve the security of our operation’. His gratitude was premature.

      Beyond Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa’s description of the delta’s desolation and the Nigerian government’s oppression of the Ogonis aroused fierce protests. Shell was urged to exploit its financial influence and persuade the government to cease the violence and grant the Ogonis independence. Herkströter, supported by younger directors including Mark Moody-Stuart, the British heir apparent, resisted those demands. ‘We have to work with the government,’ the directors agreed. ‘We don’t have a mandate to interfere.’ Recalling the outrage during the 1960s about American multinationals including ITT and United Fruit directly interfering in South American affairs, Shell’s directors declared, ‘We don’t get involved in politics.’ In arguments with representatives of the relief agencies, Moody-Stuart insisted, ‘Even if the government steals money, we cannot do anything about it. We are guests in the country and cannot intervene.’

      In May 1994, Saro-Wiwa СКАЧАТЬ