Presenting, “The Company That Bribed The World”
This won’t exactly come as a surprise: the global oil industry is corrupt.
We are, after all, talking about the most financialized commodity in the history of the world, and up until a few years ago, it was controlled by a cartel comprised entirely of nations run by caricatures and stereotypes that the Western public generally regarded as a kind of necessary evil in a world that revolves around fossil fuels.
More recently, we’ve seen how oil funds terrorism and how crude prices are manipulated by the Gulf monarchies to secure “ancillary diplomatic benefits” in the never-ending quest to perpetuate Sunni hegemony in the Arabian Peninsula.
In short, blood money and oil money are synonymous concepts and at the end of the day, any geopolitical dispute that can’t be explained by sectarianism, tribalism, or some other ancient cultural rift, can very likely be explained by a dispute over energy.
Given the above, we weren’t at all shocked to learn that a heretofore obscue firm based in Monaco has made a killing by perfecting the art of oil market bribery and corruption. But even if the story isn’t surprising, it is nonetheless intriguing and with that in mind we present below excerpts from “The Company The Bribed The World,” a collaborative piece by Huff Post and Fairfax Media.
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From The Huffington Post
A massive leak of confidential documents has for the first time exposed the true extent of corruption within the oil industry, implicating dozens of leading companies, bureaucrats and politicians in a sophisticated global web of bribery and graft.
After a six-month investigation across two continents, Fairfax Media and The Huffington Post can reveal that billions of dollars of government contracts were awarded as the direct result of bribes paid on behalf of firms including British icon Rolls-Royce, US giant Halliburton, Australia’s Leighton Holdings and Korean heavyweights Samsung and Hyundai.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
