CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Dirty Money at Work 67
ships with Tri-Star and Tesler, as well as with Stanley and Chaudan, and
agreed to cooperate with the ongoing French investigation. This story will
unfold for years to come.
To keep up with the country where I lived for 15 years and still have
interests and close friends, I read the excellent e-mail newsletter Nigeria
2Day@aol.com. A sense of the severe strains on the country is conveyed by
a few excerpts from Nigeria2Day, quoted with the permission of the publishers
and with minor edits to abbreviate passages.
• Oil industry experts say criminal networks, operating with the tacit
support of powerful political and military elements, are illegally siphoning
off about $1 billion of oil a year. Between 100,000 and
130,000 barrels a day with a market value of around $3 million is being
stolen. (May 30, 2003)
• Over 150 villagers are now known to have died when a fire erupted
around a leaking fuel pipeline in the village of Amiyi-Uhu. Despite
the risks, hundreds of people waded through a river of highly flammable
fuel with buckets and jerry cans. “There is too much hunger,
there is too much unemployment” says Bernard Orji, an extremely
angry local politician who visited the scene. “Young boys and young
girls died here. If you look around you can see slippers and shoes that
belong to kids. It is an index of the poverty level in this community.”
And it provides a stark image of the inequality and poverty that is
widespread in a country where successive governments have conspicuously
failed to invest the billions of dollars earned from oil over the
decades, back into developing the nation’s potential. (July 7, 2003)
• The federal government has told several international oil trading
companies to repay more than $100 million it says it was defrauded
of through the inflation of oil import costs. The Nigerian
National Petroleum Company fired seven oil-trading officials last
month on suspicion of conspiring with suppliers to defraud it of
“hundreds of millions of dollars” by manipulating shipping documents.
(May 27, 2004)
• Nigerian waters were the most deadly during the first half of 2004 according
to a new piracy report, and analysts are blaming the proliferation
of weapons in the coastal oil-rich Niger Delta region where