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.

As part of a deal to spare the company a damaging criminal conviction in that case, Shell agreed to what was, in effect, a probation order, by giving an undertaking to the US Department of Justice to tighten up its internal controls in order to stay in compliance with America's tough anti-corruption laws.

Matthew Page worked for the US State Department in Nigeria for 15 years. He told the BBC: "At a time when Shell should have been cautious having just settled a previous case, rather than walk away from a deal with clear corruption risks, they doubled down."

Fortunately, sociologist Michael Schwartz, an old-time TomDispatch regular, is back after a long absence to remind us of The One Fact in Iraq, the one we should never forget. Tom

Under the seething ocean of Sunni discontent lies a factor that is being ignored. The insurgents are not only in a struggle against what they see as oppression by a largely Shiite government in Baghdad and its security forces, but also over who will control and benefit from what Maliki -- speaking for most of his constituents -- told the Wall Street Journal is Iraq’s “national patrimony.”

When, in 2009, the Obama administration first began withdrawing U.S. combat troops, Iraqis everywhere -- but especially in Sunni areas -- faced up to 60% unemployment, sporadic electrical service, poisoned water systems, episodic education, a dysfunctional medical system, and a lack of viable public or private transportation. Few Westerners remember that, in 2010, Maliki based his election campaign on a promise to remedy these problems by -- that figure again -- increasing oil production to six million barrels per day.

none of this oil wealth trickled down to the grassroots, especially in Sunni areas of the country where signs of reconstruction, economic development, restored services, or jobs were hard to discern. Instead, the vast new revenues disappeared into the recesses of a government ranked by Transparency International as the seventh most corrupt on the planet.

In a rare moment of ironic insight, Time magazine concluded its coverage of the F-16 purchase with this comment: “The good news is the deal will likely keep Lockheed’s F-16 plant in Fort Worth running perhaps a year longer. The bad news is that only 70% of Iraqis have access to clean water, and only 25% have clean sanitation.”

With conditions worsening, Sunni communities only became more insistent, supplementing their petitions and demonstrations with sit-ins at government offices, road blockades, and Tahrir Square-type occupations of public spaces. Maliki’s responses also escalated to arresting the political messengers, dispersing demonstrations, and, in a key moment in 2013, “killing dozens” of protestors when his “security forces opened fire on a Sunni protest camp.” This repression and the continued frustration of local demands helped regenerate the insurgencies that had been the backbone of the Sunni resistance during the American occupation. Once lethal violence began to be applied by government forces, guerrilla attacks became common in the areas north and west of Baghdad that the U.S. occupiers had labeled “the Sunni triangle.”

Bassey noted, for instance, that although the PIB is a good first step, the document as packaged, is not as strong as it ought to be. According to him, the PIB does not have stringent pro-people and pro-environment provisions, as the country, despite the PIB, will still be having illegal routine gas flaring. He blamed the delay in passing the bill on what he described as ‘toxic politics’ and pressure from the IOCs who have openly said they would not accept laws that curb their excessive profits as well as wrong perception by some legislators that provision of funds for communities mean more money to the oil-bearing states.

Nnimmo argued that although, the PIB makes the offer of money to oil-bearing communities on one hand, it takes it away on the other. “The PIB criminalises communities when it says that if oil facilities are tampered with then the communities, local government areas, and states would pay. Communities are not the policemen of oil facilities. The PIB speaks the old language of subsisting laws that free IOCs of responsibility where facilities are interfered with by third parties. That has made the claim of sabotage the favourite refrain of the oil companies even before incidents are investigated. The PIB fell into the same anti-people trap,” he explained.

Bassey insisted that what Nigeria needs to do right now is to “massively increase oil revenues by halting oil theft. We are not talking about poor villagers scooping crude oil in buckets and jerry cans. Those also need to be stopped. We are talking about the industrial-scale oil theft going on in the oil sector. The official figure bandied by the Ministry of Finance as well as the National Assembly is that 400,000 barrels of crude oil are stolen everyday,” he said As for local operators, Bassey and other experts and stakeholders said the ability of local operators to hold their own would depend, to a very large extent, on better collaboration, better host community management, proper valuation and raising smart financing. They also require huge investment in knowledge, research and development (R&D).

Mutiu Sunmonu, Managing Director of SPDC, said the divestment of his company’s assets was a deliberate measure to encourage indigenous participation in the upstream oil and gas industry. His words: “We want to create a new set of indigenous players in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry within the next 10 to 20 years from now, while the IOCs concentrate on more difficult issues and also allow us focus on material oil and gas fields.” The divestments are seen by some industry watchers as representing the single largest opportunity for Nigerian operators with the requisite expertise and capital to emerge as major upstream players.

Donziger and the "named plaintiffs" in the litigation against Chevron have filed a petition with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to have Judge Kaplan removed from the case for bias. In an extraordinary move, the appellate court has set oral argument on the issue for September 26th. If Kaplan gets tossed, Chevron’s strategy would suffer a devastating setback.

And the reality is that we don’t really know what Chevron is doing behind the scenes. Kroll has admitted compiling “20 to 30” reports on Donziger, who along with his family has been followed around Manhattan and put under surveillance by unknown plainclothes operatives.

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.

The companies’ claim that they bought the block from the state, not Malabu, is disingenuous, says Mr Mayne of Global Witness. It is also contradicted by Nigeria’s attorney-general, Mohammed Bello Adoke, who told a parliamentary committee last July that the companies “agreed to pay Malabu”, with the government acting as an “obligor” and “facilitator.”

The EFCC’s report states: “Investigations conducted so far reveal a cloudy scene associated with fraudulent dealings. A prima facie case of conspiracy, breach of trust, theft anmd [sic] money laundering can be established against some real and artificial persons.” Officially, the EFCC’s investigation is still open, but a source familiar with it says that its sleuths have been discouraged by higher-ups from moving forward. However, other countries’ fraudbusters have taken an interest. At least one of the parties involved in the oil-block sale has been contacted by America’s Department of Justice.

The saga is a striking example of an ethical dilemma that is growing more acute for international oil companies. They are desperate to replace their shrinking reserves with new finds, but many of the most attractive fields are in unstable or poorly governed places.

Mr Hughes argues that when foreign companies turn a blind eye to questionable aspects of a deal, it can sometimes benefit developing countries with natural resources. The publicly traded oil majors are, on balance, a force for good, raising overall standards of behaviour by trying to operate as cleanly as possible in most circumstances, he says; better that than leaving the field to less scrupulous operators.

Global Witness prefers to see the OPL245 affair as “a lesson in corruption” that demonstrates how important it is for rich-world governments to press on with transparency initiatives

The companies from day one recruit these so called expatriates from countries where labour is so cheap, pay them what they were supposed to be paid in their countries but on paper claim they are paid what oil workers earn in Austrialia or America. Is this not fraud and money laundering?