Tag Archives: lobbying

How BP made friends with Mu’ammar Gaddafi

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On Monday, BP CEO Bob Dudley declared that “we remain committed to doing business” in Libya and stressed that offshore operations in the region were still open and continuing. That morning, stories of tanks crushing unarmed protestors in Benghazi and massacres by (British-built) sniper rifles had been front page news. As Dudley spoke, reports emerged of airstrikes targeting demonstrations across the country.

Bob Dudley didn’t amend his earlier statement, nor was he asked to. Media article after media article cited the decision to evacuate “BP staff & families” – only the 40 expat staff of course, not BP’s Libyan employees. Some referred to the controversy over BP’s entry to Libya, and whether the company had lobbied for the Prisoner Transfer Agreement and Al-Megrahi’s release. But no-one questioned BP’s right or Dudley’s judgement in continuing offshore operations, in Libyan waters only miles from Gaddafi’s continued assault?

With Libya’s enormous oil reserves – the largest in Africa with most of the country still unprospected – ever so tempting, BP had been trying to break into Libya for years. The company lobbied hard, utilising the weight and levers of the British foreign energy policy machinery, despite knowing precisely what Gaddafi stood for. Barely a year before BP signed its deal, many protestors were murdered during February 2006 demonstrations in Benghazi.

Success arrived in May 2007, with then-newly appointed BP CEO Tony Hayward and Libya National Oil Company Chairman Shokri Ghanem signed the documents in Libya’s coastal town of Sirt. PM Tony Blair flew in to witness the event and Hayward describing his delight that “Our agreement is the start of an enduring, long-term and mutually beneficial partnership with Libya.“

BP had reason to be excited, and to pay the $350 million signature bonus towards new tanks and new rifles, or to be squirreled away in a hidden bank account. In the company’s words, the contract represented “The single largest exploration commitment in BP’s 100-year history and the single biggest award of exploration acreage by Libya to an international energy company in modern times.” The 54,000 square kilometres of acreage awarded to the company were four times the total of all other projects combined. The offshore Sirt basin block alone covers an area larger than Belgium. The terms of the Production Sharing Agreement signed were also more generous than those previously gained by US company Oxy and Austrian OMV.

Such a vast area in a resource-heavy area was likely to deliver, with estimates that BP would eventually spend more than $20 billion on exploration and extraction infrastructure. The offshore “seismic acquisition” – firing of high-intensity air guns into the ocean – begun in September 2008 alone was described as “one of the largest and most ambitious such projects ever embarked upon by our industry anywhere globally.”

Ian Smale, the head BP North Africa when the deal was struck, proudly described his sense of “partnership” developed with the Libyan regime over many cups of tea. Questioned about BP’s current exposure in Libya at an oil conference on Monday, Smale – now Head of Strategy for BP - responded, “With specific regard to Libya, our first concern is our people and the security and integrity of our operations.” BP’s security in Libya was provided by the military – presumably now either defected or overpowered by the growing opposition. Somehow it’s not surprising that Smale’s first concern was the security and integrity of our operations, even while newspapers were full with reports of atrocities. The frustration is that this is considered acceptable by journalists that quoted him.

Smale and Hayward themselves always knew that they were doing business with a repressive dictator. And they understood that working with Gaddafi would be easier if they could improve his image, and extoll how beneficial a relationship between Libya and BP would be for Britain.

An eight-page gleaming colour celebration of Libya’s “progress” was published. “Libya Rising” tells us that all is good: women are free, the streets are safe, Westerners are loved, people are becoming richer, BP will teach English, the country is open to business. Hints of brutal repression, prisons, restrictions on journalists or lack of democracy there are none. Not even a whiff of unhappiness. BP’s Libya business support manager Ian McGregor assures us that this is “one of the safest places I’ve been to with BP. [...] Initially, most people ask about security. They think it’s very unsafe, or there are a lot of army and guns everywhere. To be honest, it’s the absolute opposite.”

The BP hired journalist goes on to describe how Libya’s “per-capita income is among the continent’s highest”, obscuring the inequitable distribution of that income and rampant poverty. NOC Chairman Dr Ghanem gets to make an appearance as well, explaining how “the importance of Libya as a stable country” makes it a good destination for investment. The regime was, after all, the most stable in Africa – Gaddafi had ruled for 42 years.

Later on Monday, CNBC broadcast part of an interview BP CEO Dudley about a new deal with India’s Reliance Industries. With the Libya story so big, correspondent Rebecca Meehan was eager to ask what he made of the situation in Libya and North Africa. The video shows Dudley relaxed and happy to explain that the situation “has not disrupted any of our businesses at any point so far. Our activities are far away from any of the troubled areas, but time will tell.” According to Meehan, he went on to explain that BP was “committed to improving the business in Libya regardless of the political situation”.
“Regardless of the political situation” - dictatorship or not.

Although to be fair to BP, the company did apparently try to improve the lives of Libyans who might not benefit from the billions of dollars the company planned to transfer to Gaddafi’s regime. On June 14 2010, BP also ran a public road safety event.


BP Road Safety Event – June 2010

 

Nigerians challenge Shell over meddling in internal affairs

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After Shell’s highly-publicised “threat” to leave Nigeria given a current Petroleum Bill being discussed in Parliament that would re-assess excessive corporate revenues, Environmental Rights Action based in Benin City and Port Harcourtresponds:

“The foremost environmental rights advocacy organization in Nigeria, Environmental Rights Action (ERA), has accused the Anglo-Dutch oil and gas major, Shell, of not being a good corporate citizen in the country.

ERA claimed in a statement on Monday that the warning by Shell that Nigeria’s declining oil output will be aggravated if the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) is passed into law was an attempt to frustrate the move by the country to bring sanity into the sector and recover some level of sovereignty in relation to the resource.

The oil majors prefer to perpetrate the existing unfair relationships, remain unaccountable, operate in impunity and evade taxes and public scrutiny. “Shell’s ploy should be disregarded by the Federal Government”, ERA said in a statement wired to our correspondent by its Media Officer, Mr. Philip Jakpor

The group’s position is coming in the wake of widely publicized reports in the media indicating that Shell is suspending new investments in Nigeria, especially in the deep offshore where the PIB stipulates conditions that will benefit the nation.

Along with the American oil giants, ExxonMobil and Chevron, Shell has voiced its opposition to key sections of the PIB which ERA says allow the Federal Government to renegotiate old contracts, impose higher costs on oil companies and reclaim oil fields that oil companies are yet to explore.

“The companies will also be forced to give back unused land from existing oil licenses to provide new investors an opportunity to operate in Nigeria”, the group said.

Ann Pickard, Shell Regional Executive Vice President last week in Abuja warned that proposals to impose tougher terms on oil companies as part of the sweeping reforms in Nigeria’s oil industry designed to reverse years of stagnation would be ruinous. This has always been her sign song and is nothing new.

But ERA is depicting the warnings as “sinister, selfish and well-timed” and targeted at forcing the Nigerian government to back down on legislations that will guarantee improved revenue, transparency and accountability.

“We refuse this attempt to meddle in our internal affairs. Shell’s sloganeering on Nigeria’s declining oil output and the sustained publicity blitz on plans to divest from the country is a calculated arm-twisting tactic to get the Nigerian government to back down on laws that will make the oil companies accountable to the Nigerian people,” said ERA Executive Director, Nnimmo Bassey.

assey posited that: “Oil majors operating in Nigeria’s oil industry have always been economical when it comes to disclosure about oil revenues, gas flaring and environmental justice in host communities. ERA strongly commends the courage of community people, civil society groups and some of our lawmakers at the National Assembly whose resilience in reversing the status quo has resulted in this attempt to blackmail the nation economically.”

According to Bassey, Niger Delta communities are particularly irked that there is a conscious attempt by Shell and a profiteering cabal in the oil industry to ensure that provisions in the PIB do not allow for communities to be notified of risks or seek their endorsement of environmental management plans.

“The National Assembly must refuse this distraction and speedily pass the PIB, taking into account civil society inputs reinforcing sections pertaining to Health, Safety, Environment and community participation. This section must reflect clearly and unequivocally that without the communities, environmental plans are superficial and defensive only of the interests of business concerns.”

He explained that ERA’s position also aligns with that of well-meaning Nigerians who have said there is also need for redrafting of the section on Environmental Remediation Levy which requires states and local governments to pay one and 0.5 per cent of their annual derivation allocation into a Remediation Fund to restore the environment in cases of damage resulting from sabotage since oils spill are not as a result of sabotage, but a result of negligence of the oil companies.

“We totally reject Shell’s media whitewash on declining oil revenues. The PIB should be expeditiously passed into law and applied in operations in the oil and gas sector. This will help ensure better environmental protection, better revenue returns and accountability. For us, the PIB is primarily about the management of existing fields while Nigeria rapidly moves to a post-petroleum regime with a halt to new oil field activities that have so far been the alchemists pot brewing corruption, violence and unimaginable degradation of the Niger Delta,” Bassey stressed.”

BP & Shell support ‘astro-turfing’ climate blockers

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Lobby groups funded by BP & Shell are organising public rallies in the US to oppose proposed legislation that would cap carbon emissions. The American Petroleum Institute (API) provided “upfront resources” to pay for an events company to organise public protest meetings.
The tactic of “astroturfing” has been used by corporations since the 1990s to create the impression of grassroots, popular opposition to proposals for social justice and environmental protection. In this case, API has helped create a front“Energy Citizens” which is organising 20 phoney rallies targeting vulnerable senators ahead of the September senate vote on the bill.

BP has promised that it will “make no political contributions from corporate funds anywhere in the world” and that while still engaging in policy debates, “we won’t fund any political activity or any political party”. Yet its financial contributions to the API are clearly being used to attempt to block passage of the Clean Energy Bill. Gives an indication of what to expect from the oil majors in the run-up to COP in Copenhagen in December.
When confronted over the issue by the Guardian, BP said it was “highly unlikely” it would leave the API.

Greenpeace have launched an online action to challenge the lobbying while PLATFORM and Greenpeace have sent this letter to BP (and a similar one to Shell):

Dear Tony Hayward,

We write to express our concern over your company’s membership of the American Petroleum Institute (API). BP maintains its membership of the API through paying substantial fees based on the large size of BP’s business. It is our concern that these fees are used by the API for political activity and that BP’s reputation is used by the API to endorse views on climate change that contradict BP’s position on the issue.

It has come to the world’s attention that the API is spending millions of dollars on lobbying US politicians to reject the Waxman-Markey clean energy act. In the most recent revelations, it is clear that the API is planning to fund and organise phoney demonstrations targeting vulnerable senators ahead of the September senate vote on the bill.

The headline on the Financial Times’ front page on Saturday 15 August, (Oil industry split on climate law protests) echoed similar headlines from 12 years ago when your company rightly began to distance itself from the untenable position on climate change held by the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), itself driven primarily by the API. Back then Reuters reported that the, “Global Oil Lobby (was) split by Climate Debate”.

Twelve years later we stand on the edge of finally seeing the USA taking its first step towards addressing its huge greenhouse gas burden. The urgency with which that action needs to be taken is great precisely because those interests that opposed action back in 1997 were so successful. This time those interests must not be allowed to prevail as it is widely recognised that we can no longer delay.

In 2002, your company’s then CEO Lord John Browne stated that BP would, “make no political contributions from corporate funds anywhere in the world” and that while still engaging in policy debates, “we won’t fund any political activity or any political party”.

BP’s financial contributions to the API are clearly being used for political activity. In this year alone the API has reported over US$3.6 million in lobbying expenditure. Much of that lobbying is specifically aimed at blocking the passage of the Waxman-Markey Act.

This activity stands in stark contrast to the position of your company and its participation in the United States Climate Action Partnership, which supports the Waxman-Marley Act.

The organisations signing this letter believe that BP’s membership of the API undermines its position on climate change and the Waxman-Markey Bill. We urge you to withdraw your membership of the API immediately until such time as the API ceases opposing the bill and US government action on climate change.

Signed:

John Sauven Director Greenpeace UK
James Marriott Partner PLATFORM

BP’s extraction operations in Brussels

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Only in Brussels for 90 minutes, so not long enough to visit BP’s office on Rondpoint Schumann, adjacent to the European Commission.

This provides the company’s easy access for major EU lobbying of various EU institutions. BP — Extracting Influence at the heart of the EU, a report published earlier in 2009 by Corporate Europe Observatory and PLATFORM unmasked BP’s attempts to harness EU foreign policy and legislative power for its own benefit.

The report reveals the oil giant’s close relationship with decision makers and highlights how the company has convinced Commissioners and others that BP’s interests are in the EU’s interest – allowing it to promote profit-driven approaches to climate change through emissions trading. The company has also exploited the EU’s diplomatic muscle in Russia encouraging risky dependence on Russian gas.

Howard Chase, BP’s Head of European Affairs, chairs the Industry Advisory Panel of the Energy Charter, while BP Chairman Peter Sutherland chaired the Foreign Economic Relations Working Group at the European Roundtable of Industrialists. BPEurope’s efforts regularly pay off, with the European Commission and other EU institutions regularly intervening on behalf of the company. Arguments between BP management and Russian shareholders of TNK-BP led to several EUCommissioners pressuring Russian President Putin to make BP’s case.

BP Europe staff know their company well. Rather than relying on career lobbyists, BP rotate staff from their flagship producing regions into Brussels. One of the key BP figures in Azerbaijan responsible for creating the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field has been working for BP Europe the last few years.