Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [3]
Bongo’s story is a miniature tale of what happened when France formally relinquished its colonies. As countries in Africa and elsewhere gained independence, the old beneficiaries of the French empire set up new ways to stay in control behind the scenes. Gabon became independent in 1960, just as it was starting to emerge as a promising new African oil frontier, and France paid it particular attention. France needed to install the right president: an authentic African leader who would be charismatic, strong, cunning, and, when it mattered, utterly pro-French. In Omar Bongo they found the perfect candidate: He was from a tiny minority ethnic group and had no natural domestic support base, so he would have to rely on France to protect him. In 1967, aged just 32, Bongo became the world’s youngest president, and for good measure France placed several hundred paratroopers in a barracks in Libreville, connected to one of his palaces by underground tunnels. This intimidating deterrent against coup plots proved so effective that by the time Bongo died in 2009, he was the world’s longest-serving leader.
In exchange for France’s backing Bongo gave two things. First, he gave French companies almost exclusive access to his country’s minerals, on highly preferential terms that were deeply unfair to the people of Gabon. The country became known as French companies’ chasse gardée—their private hunting ground. But the second thing Bongo provided was more interesting. He allowed his country, through its oil industry, to become the African linchpin of the gigantic, secret Elf system—a vast, spooky web of global corruption secretly connecting the oil industries of former French African colonies with mainstream politics in metropolitan France, via Switzerland, Luxembourg, and other tax havens. Parts of Gabon’s oil industry, Joly discovered as she dug deeper and deeper in Paris, had been serving as a giant slush fund: a pot of secret money outside the reach of French judicial authorities in which hundreds of millions of dollars were made available for the use of French elites. An African oil cargo would be sold, and the proceeds would split up into a range of bewildering accounts in tax havens, where they could be used to supply bribes and baubles for whatever the unaccountable elites who controlled the system deemed fit.
Out of this pot, money flowed secretly to finance French political parties, the intelligence services, and other well-connected parts of French high society. Elf’s secret money greased the wheels of French political and commercial diplomacy around the globe: France’s biggest corporations were allowed to use this West African oil pot as a source of easy bribe money to support their bids for giant contracts ranging from Venezuela to Germany to Jersey to Taiwan—and the out-of-sight Gabon connection meant that the money trails did not lead to them. (One man told me how he once carried a suitcase of cash provided by Omar Bongo to pay off a top rebel separatist in the Angolan oil enclave of Cabinda, where Elf had a lucrative contract.)
President Bongo, for his part, was one of the smartest political operators of his generation and tapped into French Freemasonry networks and African secret societies to become one of the most important power brokers in France itself. He was the key to French leaders’ ability to bind les grands—opinion-formers and politicians from across Africa and beyond—into France’s postcolonial foreign policy. This immensely powerful, corrupt subterranean system helped France punch above its weight in global economic and political affairs and remain significantly in control after independence, behind the scenes. A local journalist summed the relationship up for me most effectively. “The French went out of the front door,” he said, “and came back in through a side window.”
The system emerged gradually, but by the 1970s it was already serving as a