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Swedish journalists (r) jailed in Ethiopia
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After two Swedish journalists claiming they were
investigating the presence of the Lundin Group in Ethiopia were found guilty of
terror crimes on Wednesday, Swedish investigative journalist Leo Lagercrantz
takes a closer look at the Swedish company and foreign minister Carl Bildt's
involvement with it.
- Swedes convicted of terror crimes in Ethiopia (21 Dec 11)
- Swedish journalists 'must be freed': Reinfeldt (21 Dec 11)
- Bildt avoids Sudan war crimes probe (21 Oct 11)
- Bildt slams paper over 'amateur' reporting (17 Oct 11)
On July 1st of this year, Swedish journalists Johan Persson
and Martin Schibbye were arrested after having ventured into the disputed
Ogaden Province in eastern Ethiopia in the company of soldiers from the ONLF
guerrillas.
They were found guilty of terror crimes by an Ethiopian
court on Wednesday.
The story of the Swedes is more than business as usual, for
the Ethiopian regime and for the Swedish government.
The affair has once again put the spotlight on Carl Bildt's
previous involvement in the mining and oil group, The Lundin Group - founded by
the now deceased, controversial Adolf H. Lundin - and listed on the Stockholm
and Toronto stock exchanges.
This time it's about Carl Bildt sitting on the board and
being involved in negotiating the agreement between Lundin Petroleum and the
Ethiopian regime in Addis Ababa.
And it was precisely the Lundin Group's presence and crimes
against humanity allegedly committed in connection with the establishment of
the deal that the Swedish journalists wanted to investigate.
When it became known that the Swedes had been arrested Carl
Bildt commented: "It's an area we have been advised against traveling to
because it is a dangerous area."
The foreign minister's statement has caused concern and
anger among Schibbye and Persson's fellow journalists, and many Swedish
publishers are today asking the question: Whose interests does Carl Bildt
represent - the captured Swedish citizens’ or the Ethiopian regime?
Or perhaps his own?
And Sweden's largest newspaper, Aftonbladet, is campaigning
on its cultural pages for his resignation.
The suspicion has not exactly diminished after
Göteborgs-Posten (GP) got an interview with the head of Africa Oil in Addis
Abeba, James Phillips, where he claims that he had a close cooperation with the
former Swedish ambassador to Ethiopia, Staffan Tillander, and that Africa Oil
and the Swedish ambassador on a regular basis exchanged “security info” and
travelled in Ogaden together.
This leads to the conclusion that it's OK for Swedish
companies with questionable reputations to be in Ogaden, but for Swedish
journalists investigating crimes against humanity, it is not.
But the Ethiopian affair is just one of several that are
haunting the Swedish foreign minister after his seven years in the Lundin
sphere.
Let us go back ten years to the year 2000. It was the year
that the former prime minister (1991-1994) and EU envoy to the Balkans (1995)
joined the Lundin Petroleum's board of directors.
The seven years with the Lundin Group that followed would
make Carl Bildt a wealthy man. But at what price?
His time as a “Lundin man” follows him like a dark shadow
that he can’t shake.
This is because The Lundin Group is not just any other
listed company.
The founder, the Swedish rock engineer and oil and gas
magnate Adolf H. Lundin, made a fortune back in the 1970s when he came across
huge natural gas fields in Qatar.
However, the company attracted international attention the
first time in 1984, when, despite the UN boycott, it mined gold in South
Africa. Adolf H. Lundin, however, couldn’t be bothered with the criticism:
"I do not understand the Swedish rage against this beautiful
country," he told the Swedish newspaper Expressen.
The next storm of criticism came in 1996. This time, after
The Lundin Group was blacklisted by the United Nations who believed that the
company had plundered the Congo for its assets.
Today, the Lundin sphere is the second largest owner of the
Tenke Fungurume facility (ownership amounts to 24.5 percent) but the mine
continues to be the subject of criticism from NGOs.
Among other things, the Lundin sphere and the other owners
have been criticized for having displaced people who today are forced to live
under canvas, although they were promised decent housing.
After the deals in the Congo, the Lundin ravage there has
been compared to the ruthless imperialism in Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart
of Darkness" in the Swedish media.
So who then was Adolf H. Lundin (1938 - 2006)? A modern
variant of the ivory collector Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's novel, or a charming
Indiana Jones type?
Bildt, who wrote Lundin's obituary, described him like this:
"Adolf is a true global entrepreneur of a species that
unfortunately we hardly have in Sweden."
The descriptions of Adolf H. Lundin as 100 percent
contractor is substantiated by his own description of himself:
"We work without regard to political risks. (...) The
only thing that is important to us is that what we are looking for can be
something big.”
But for those who read the authorized biography written by
journalist Robert Eriksson, now responsible at the company for Investor
Relations in Europe, a different picture is presented of the tycoon who built
up the Lundin empire: Adolf H. Lundin did indeed have political passion.
He was an ardent anti-Communist who was involved in the
Washington, DC-based conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation.
Adolf H. Lundin sponsored Ronald Reagan's election campaign;
in return, he and his wife Eva were invited to the Reagent inauguration in
1981. The program included a show with Frank Sinatra that the couple watched
from the front row.
So what was Adolf H. Lundin’s position towards doing
business with communist countries?
He answered author Robert Eriksson like this:
"I would not have dreamed of doing business with Soviet
Communist politicians."
When it came to the German Nazis, however, the answer is
different:
"That I certainly would have done. There was no one who
knew what really happened there until very late, at the end of World War
II."
Among all of the controversial projects that Adolf H. Lundin
initiated, there is one which even today - five years after Adolf H. Lundin's
death – continues to drain the company and the Swedish foreign minister's trust
capital: Sudan.
Since the summer of 2010 there has been an ongoing criminal
investigation by the International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm
concerning Lundin Petroleum's operations in Sudan.
When Carl Bildt in 2000 agreed to become a member of the
board of the Lundin Group, the company had already been active there for three
years. Human rights groups were early to assert that the government bombed
villages and killed and expelled the local population in the province of Unity State
(also called the Western Upper Nile), so that Lundin Petroleum could prospect
for oil undisturbed.
But as usual, when accused of unethical business, the
company was unresponsive to criticism. When Carl Bildt was questioned in the
Riksdag's Constitutional Committee in April 2007 (this time about his options
in the Lundin company Vostok Nafta, all of whose assets were in Russian
Gazprom) he rejected the criticism, countering that his commitment has
contributed to peace in the region.
When after the hearing in the constitutional committee,
reporters pressed Carl Bildt it ended as it often does with the Swedish foreign
minister: he berated them, pushed on factual errors, often petty, in the
questions - and got laughs and sympathy on his side.
After the hearing in the constitutional committee he
appeared in the Swedish media more as a hero of peace in Sudan, rather than a
dubious businessman.
And he has continued to be one of the Reinfeldt government’s
most popular ministers. The criticism of him and his commitment to The Lundin
Group has been brushed aside as "leftist propaganda.”
However, lately support for Carl Bildt has begun to fade.
His arrogant attitude to the case of the Swedish journalist
Dawit Isaak, who has been imprisoned for 10 years in Eritrea without trial, has
created discontent among Swedish journalists. His unwillingness to criticize first
Iran (where Lundin has been active through its subsidiary Lundin Munir) and
then Qaddafi, whose regime the Lundin Group long had close relations with, has
disappointed many of his former supporters.
While the majority of the world’s democratic leaders
condemned Qhaddafi when he attacked demonstrators with fighter jets, Bildt took
another position.
“It has nothing to do with supporting one or the other, it
has to do with obtaining stability and a reasonable development,” he said.
Yet again the question needed to be raised: Did the Swedish
foreign minister’s peculiar, tactful attitude towards crimes against humanity
have any connection with his time as a Lundin board member?
His veto recently against EU-sanctions against Syria –
called “The Ericsson factor” because of Swedish pundits' analysis that he voted
against full sanctions to protect the Swedish telecom company’s interests – has
also created amazement.
And now, on Wednesday, two Swedish journalists were found
guilty of terror crimes by an Ethiopian court.
Lundin Petroleum first established itself in Ethiopia in
2006. The situation in Somali Ethiopia, as the area is also called, was
difficult even before Lundin started looking for gas and oil there. Security
consultants warned Lundin against establishing operations in the Ogaden - but
in vain.
The company signed a contract with the Ethiopian regime.
And in connection with the establishment, the government
took the opportunity to "clean up" so that no one or anything could
interfere with the exploitation.
That they wanted to get rid of various rebel groups and
warring tribes is not surprising, but the allegations of the methods used are
familiar ones when it comes to how the Lundin Group does business in Africa:
burned villages, people displacement, and systematic rape.
That is at least what human rights organizations like Human
Rights Watch and other experts claim. But the documentation of the regime's
abuses in Somali Ethiopia is far from satisfactory.
The regime has effectively isolated the area, and to visit
it unlawfully is considered a terrorist crime.
This means that the army can feel safe – it's not possible
to produce any evidence that could lead to prosecution in The Hague.
But multinationals in place there, such as the Swedish
Lundin Group (Lundin Petroleum's operations were taken over by African Oil, in
which they still have a strong interest) have had little to fear.
The same applies to political socialites such as Carl Bildt.
The Lundin Group's business in Ethiopia has received little
media exposure.
Until now.
And while the criticism of Bildt's handling of the
Ethiopia-Swedes is growing in strength, there is also a preliminary
investigation which should may also cause the foreign minister to lose sleep:
the International Public Prosecution Office in Stockholm's investigation of
crimes against humanity in Sudan 1997-2003.
No one yet has been informed they are under suspicion, and
the prosecutor, Magnus Elving, has not even mentioned that it is Lundin Oil
currently under investigation.
But he confirmed that the investigation started because of a
report by a human rights organization that explicitly criticized this
particular company.
When I talk with Magnus Elving he says:
"So far we have devoted ourselves to gathering
documentation. Now we are beginning to approach the stage where it becomes
necessary to call in [people] for questioning."
Prosecutor Elving is optimistic: "The investigation
will take at least another year, but we will not give up so easily."
Adolf H. Lundin died in 2006 and today the group is led by
sons Lukas and Ian Lundin.
They have invested
considerable resources in re-profiling the Group and making it more socially
acceptable. They have started a philanthropic operation - Lundin for Africa,
and have also donated $100 million to the Clinton Foundation.
In a business context, The Lundin Group has made headlines
recently for having made a giant oil discovery in the North Sea that caused its
shares to shoot up.
Despite happy charities and investors, questions about what
really happened when Lundin Petroleum established itself in Somali Ethiopia
have not disappeared.
Recently, when The Lundin Group was discussed at a
conference on conflict minerals at Clark University in Worcester Massachusetts,
a participant commented:
"Was it the Lundin family that Stieg Larsson had in mind
when he drew his portrait of capitalists?"
Leo Lagercrantz is an award winning investigative journalist
and former editor of the opinion pages at the Swedish tabloid Expressen.
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Interview.
Expressen's reporter Karl-Johan Karlsson
interviewing Carl Bildt in Brussels on
the oil business
with Libya. Photo: Erik Luntang
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