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Yet Idku remains defiant, even in the face of the Egyptian Liquefied Natural Gas  Project, a massive natural gas liquefaction facility on the nearby beach. The oil operations are run by two joint ventures Rashpetco and Burullus, whose shareholders include the British BG, Malaysian PETRONAS, French Gaz de France,  and the Egyptian state companies EGAS and EGPC .

Unfortunately, BP has not given up completely. Instead of recognising that it's not wanted, the company has moved to a new location futher east along the coast. Now the struggle moves to Mtubas  in Kafr elSheikh, the new proposed site for BP’s gas plant.

To day, these demands remain unmet. So when British Petroleum eyed Idku for an onshore natural gas processing plant, the community took matters into its own hand: it mobilized to stand up against the proposed project. Roads were blocked, a sit-in occupied the construction site, BP's office was raided and popular assemblies took place in the street. The organised local campaigning and resistance by the Idku community managed to halt BP’s plans.

Venezuelan dirty crude is akin to Canadian tar sands, and hopefully sense will prevail in Caracas.

In Quito and Neuva Rocafuerte deep in the Amazon last week, I witnessed the most advanced eco-social battle for a nation's hearts-and-minds underway anywhere, with the extraordinary NGO Accion Ecologica insisting that Correa's grudging government leaves the oil in Yasuni National Park's soil. Because he was trained in neoclassical economics and hasn't quite recovered, Correa favours selling Yasuni forests on the carbon markets, which progressive ecologists reject in principle.

the family of José Eduardo dos Santos, the party’s Soviet-trained leader who assumed the presidency in 1979, took personal ownership of Angola’s riches. Isabel dos Santos, the president’s daughter, amassed interests from banking to television in Angola and Portugal. In January 2013 Forbes magazine named her Africa’s first female billionaire.

Vicente built Sonangol into a formidable operation. He drove hard bargains with the oil majors that have spent tens of billions of dollars developing Angola’s offshore oilfields, among them BP of the UK and Chevron and ExxonMobil of the United States. Despite the tough negotiations, Angola dazzled the majors and their executives respected Vicente. “Angola is for us a land of success,” said Jacques Marraud des Grottes, head of African exploration and production for Total of France, which pumped more of the country’s crude than anyone else.

Sonangol awarded itself stakes in oil ventures operated by foreign companies and used the revenues to push its tentacles into every corner of the domestic economy: property, health care, banking, aviation. It even has a professional football team

Oil accounts for 98 percent of Angola’s exports and about three-quarters of the government’s income. It is also the lifeblood of the Futungo. When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola’s national accounts in 2011, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing, a sum greater than the gross domestic product of each of forty-three African countries and equivalent to one in every four dollars that the Angolan economy generates annually. Most of the missing money could be traced to off-the-books spending by Sonangol; $4.2 billion was completely unaccounted  for.

For Joe Bryant, Cobalt’s founding chairman and chief executive, a punt based on prehistoric geology appeared to have paid off spectacularly. A hundred million years ago, before tectonic shifts tore them apart, the Americas and Africa had been a single landmass—the two shores of the southern Atlantic resemble one another closely. In 2006 oil companies had pierced the thick layer of salt under the Brazilian seabed and found a load of crude. An analogous salt layer stretched out from Angola. Bryant and his geologists wondered whether the same treasure might lie beneath the Angolan salt layer.

There was just one snag. What Cobalt had not revealed—indeed, what the company maintains it did not know—was that three of the most powerful men in Angola owned secret stakes in its partner, Nazaki Oil and Gáz. One of them was Manuel Vicente. As the boss of Sonangol at the time of Cobalt’s deal, he oversaw the award of oil concessions and the terms of the contracts.

A long-neglected 1977 statute prohibits American companies from participating in the privatization of power in far-off lands. Updated in 1998, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a crime for a company that has operations in the United States to pay or offer money or anything of value to foreign officials to win business. It covers both companies themselves and their officers. For years after it was passed the FCPA was more of a laudable ideal than a law with teeth. However, from the late-2000s the agencies that were supposed to enforce it—the Department of Justice, which brings criminal cases, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock market regulator, which handles civil cases—started to do so with gusto. They went after some big names, including BAE Systems, Royal Dutch Shell, and a former subsidiary of Halliburton called Kellogg Brown & Root.