Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [2]
PROLOGUE
An Offshore Awakening
ONE NIGHT IN SEPTEMBER 1997 I RETURNED home to my flat in North London to find that a man with a French accent had left a message on my answering machine. Mr. Autogue, as he called himself, had heard from an editor at the Financial Times (whom I was writing for) that I was to visit the oil-rich country of Gabon on Africa’s western coastline, and he said he wanted to help me during my visit. He left a number in Paris. Curious as hell, I rang back the next morning.
This was supposed to be a routine journalist’s trip to a small African country: I wasn’t expecting to find too much to write about in this sparsely populated former French colony, but the fact that English-speaking journalists almost never ventured there meant I would have the place all to myself. When I arrived, I discovered to my surprise and alarm that Mr. Autogue had flown out to the capital of Libreville with an assistant on first-class Air France tickets and they had booked themselves into the city’s most expensive hotel for a week—and their sole project, he cheerfully admitted, was to help me.
I had spent years watching, living in, and writing about the curve of oil-soaked African Atlantic coastline that ranges from Nigeria, in North Africa, through Gabon and down to Angola, farther south. Today this region supplies almost a sixth of U.S. oil imports1 and about the same share of China’s; and beneath a veneer of great wealth in each place lies terrible poverty, inequality, and conflict.
Journalists are supposed to start on the trail of a great story somewhere dramatic and dangerous. I found my story here unexpectedly, in a series of polite if unsettling meetings in Libreville. Lunch with the finance minister? No problem: Monsieur Autogue arranged it with a phone call. I drank a cocktail in a hotel lobby with the powerful half-Chinese foreign minister Jean Ping, who later became president of the U.N. General Assembly; the estimable Mr. Ping gave me as much of his time as I needed for my interview and asked graciously about my family. Later, the oil minister clasped me by the shoulder and jokingly offered me an oil field—then withdrew his hand, saying, “No: these things are only for les grands—the people who matter.”
Never more than five hundred yards from foul African poverty on the streets of Libreville, I spent a week wandering about in a bubble. Mr. Autogue’s attempts to keep my diary full made me determined to find out what it was that he might be wanting to hide. My new best friend had opened for me a zone of air-conditioned splendor: I was ushered to the front of queues to meet with powerful people, who were always delighted to see me. This parallel, charmed world, underpinned by the unspoken threat of force against anyone inside or outside the bubble who would disrupt it, is easy to miss in the affluent and easy West. In Africa the jolt was enough to begin to shake me from my sleep.
I had stumbled into what later became more widely known through a scandal in Paris as the so-called Elf affair.
The scandal began in 1994 when U.S.-based Fairchild Corp. opened a commercial dispute with a French industrialist, triggering a stock exchange inquiry. Unlike in more adversarial Anglo-Saxon legal systems, where the prosecution jousts with the defense to produce a resolution, the investigating magistrate in France is more like an impartial detective inserted between the two sides. He or she is supposed to investigate the matter until the end, when the truth is uncovered. In this case Eva Joly, the Norwegian-born investigating magistrate, found that every time she investigated something new leads would emerge. Her probes just kept going deeper. She began receiving death threats: A miniature coffin was sent to her in the post, and on a raid of one business she found a Smith & Wesson revolver, fully loaded and pointed at the entrance. But she persisted: Other magistrates became involved, and as the extraordinary revelations began to accumulate, they began to discern the outlines of a gigantic system of corruption that connected