this may be a repost but was in the story posted earlier
new Call For JDZ Probe Reeks Of Same Old News
A little-known outfit called Publish-What-You-Pay has joined forces with the R. Dobie Langenkamp crew to call for more investigations of the 2004 Licensing Round awards in the Nigeria-Sao Tome and Principe Joint Development Zone, the Vanguard daily reports from Nigeria this morning. (friends, this is an old report)
As usual, ERHC Energy is the scapegoat instead of ExxonMobil and Anadarko Petroleum, the two companies whose lawyers fomented the report Sao Tome President Fradique de Menezes calls a "whitewash" and "incomplete."
The Vanguard headline uses the word "indicted" in the sense of "accused of," not as Westerners familiar with the grand jury system use it, to formally accuse persons and bind them over for trial.
The probe, undertaken by an attorney closely associated with house lawyers for Exxon and Anadarko at the Energy Law Institute and the Tulsa University School of Law - some of whom were his students and other were earlier his classmates - is a brute-force attempt to wrest control of Block 4 from a small Nigerian-owned firm that spent $11 million setting up the Joint Development Zone when few others were interested in Sao Tome's oil prospects. Exxon has used all of its influence to try to destroy the very hardy chairman of ERHC Energy, Sir Emeka Offor, but to date has failed.
Meanwhile, the report ignores bribery allegations subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that have been leveled at both companies in hearings before the Senate Commerce Committee. The corruption charges stemming from their projects in Equatorial Guinea encompass almost all the players in the Joint Development Zone except ERHC Energy. In addition, ExxonMobil has been charged with evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and operating unlicensed, illegal airports in Nigeria.
Nonetheless, the probe tries to make Offor the bad guy, when in fact he is rather more circumspect than his major-league competitors.
The error-ridden report admitted at the end that it had found no evidence of wrongdoing on Offor's part, but apparently never looked at the efforts by Anadarko to add ExxonMobil as a partner in its bid for the coveted Block 4 of the JDZ after the deadline for bids had lapsed. ExxonMobil sent 24 big-time investment bankers and lawyers to Abuja to argue their case, but the arguments fell on deaf ears and now may never be revived.
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