Can Petroleum Aid development?

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.

The US is not alone in grappling with the liability of transnational corporations for human rights abuses: in path-breaking litigation, Hudbay Minerals stands accused in Canadian courts of complicity in human rights abuses in Guatemala.

Complicating efforts to hold transnational corporations accountable is the fact that companies often construct a series of subsidiary companies that mask their true ownership, make it hard to impost corporate liability. Imposing corporate accountability is further impeded by other factors.

Logistically, many countries in the Global South where many transnational corporations operate lack the institutional and judicial capacity to manage complex litigation. Moreover, subsidiary companies often funnel profits to the parent corporations, leaving them with inadequate cash reserves to satisfy legal liabilities. Lastly, as noted above, governments may be reluctant to send a message of corporate accountability because those in power are often the most direct beneficiaries of corporate activity.

The corporations that voluntarily adhere to principles of Corporate Social Responsibility are likely not the vociferous opponents of accountability, and are arguably at a competitive disadvantage when others are permitted to violate human rights with impunity. Given corporate complicity in egregious abuses around the world, respect for human rights should not be a function of voluntary compliance but instead a matter of enforceable legal rights. The international community must demand accountability, and reinforce and reaffirm the practices of corporations that do take seriously the impact of their behaviour. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Kiobel case should advance global justice by categorically rejecting impunity for human rights abuses in which transnational corporations are complicit.