Ailén said:Hmm... Wasn't there an Oil corruption scandal in Cameroon around 1985?
roses.univ-paris1.fr/membres/KarineMarazyan/site.../gauthier.pdf
Total was nailed by the URSSAF (Tax people) in 2008 (article in French), but I think there was something else going on in the 80s, if somebody has time to do a little bit of digging. And about the other companies mentioned in his CV before he decided to support San Francesco and his gang.
With investors like that...
Doin a search on this I found a description of how corrupted Cameroon was in the 1980's. This may not be relevant, but I still found it fascinating:
_http://crawfurd.dk/africa/cameroon_timeline.htm
November, 1982: Without prior notice Ahidjo leaves his post as president. The reason is informed to be bad health. The 49 year old Prime Minister, Paul Biya, takes over presidency. Biya has worked close together with Ahidjo and has a reputation for honesty and competence.
1983: The old colonial town of Victoria gets its current name: Limbe.
1983: The people of Cameroon starts seeing a new side of Paul Biya, which emerges with his increased power. The Prime Minister and several others in the government are fired. They are said to have plotted against him. Ahidjo moves to an exile in France after similar accusations from the presidential office.
From his domicile in France, Ahidjo re-enters the political scene. He openly criticises the new President of making Cameroon a police state. Ahidjo now claims that he was forced away from Presidency by Paul Biya. The events remains unclear, but according to many sources the reason for the critique was that Biya did not allow the ex-president to take his giant fortune out of Cameroon. Ahidjo is sentenced to death in absentia!
1984: Ahidjo is again pardoned by Biya. A military coup is attempted, but fails after three days of fighting in the streets of Yaoundé. Behind the revolt are military forces still loyal to Ahidjo. People in the government suspects involvement from France in planning the revolt. An estimated death toll of the coup attempt is 1000. The political scene in Cameroon is more chaotic than ever, but after a few months everything has again calmed down. Cameroon still has a relative good and stable economy with one the highest GNPs in Africa.
1984: An explosion of CO2 from lake Monoun kills 37 people, but the accident are almost unnoticed leaving Cameroon unprepared for next big disaster in 1986.
1984: Paul Biya gets 99.98 percent of the votes in a Presidential Election where he is the only candidate.
1985: President Biya pays a visit to France. He seeks better and stronger connections to both Europe and USA.
1986: Biya is still not allowing registration of opposition parties, but small democratic changes are made. The name of his own party is changed from UNC to Rassemblement Démocratigue du Peuple Camerounias (RDPC). The new name was probably to distance himself further from ex-president Ahidjo.
1986: Cameroon becomes the fourth African nation to establish diplomatic relations with Israel. The reason for this act is probably to please USA.
August 21, 1986: Almost 1,800 people are killed in the Lake Nyos disaster in the North Western Province. A cloud of deadly gasses suddenly erupted from the lake suffocating all life up to 25 km away from the lake. For more information visit: Degassing Nyos.
1987: The oil boom is over. This is one of the events leading to an economic crisis for Cameroon.
1988: French director Claire Denis premieres the film Chocolat. The film is inspired by her own childhood in Cameroon and delas with the relations between black/white, man/woman, child/adult.
April 24, 1988: Presidential Election. Again Paul Biya is the only candidate. This time he "wins" with 98.75 percent of the votes and continues for a new term in the office.
_http://www.allgov.com/US_and_the_World/ViewNews/Dictator_of_the_Month__Paul_Biya_of_Cameroon_110926
THE MAN—Born February 13, 1933, Biya studied in Paris and received a degree in public law. After working for two years in the presidential palace, he became director of the office of the minister of education and then moved up to secretary-general of the Education Ministry. After serving as secretary-general of the presidency, Biya was named prime minister by Ahidjo in June 1975.
At the time that Biya assumed office in 1992 {should be 1982}, Cameroon enjoyed a booming economy with solid exports of cocoa, timber, and coffee and a growing petroleum industry. Thanks to corruption and ethnic cronyism, Biya destroyed the economy. While Biya and his friends grew rich on oil money, the Cameroonian economy shrank for nine straight years beginning in 1987.
In January 1984, Biya stood for election for president and managed to win 99.98% of the vote. It is not known what happened to the two-hundredths of one percent of the voters who managed to vote against him. To be on the safe side, Biya eliminated the position of prime minister so that no rival politician could create his own power base. Three months after the election, he put down a mutiny by the mostly Islamic Republican Guard, which he blamed on Ahidjo, who was condemned to death in absentia. To demonstrate that he was not a dictator, Biya changed the name of the only legal political party from the National Cameroonian Union to the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC). In 1988, he was reelected president, although his vote percentage slipped to only 98.75%.
[...]
THE PIPELINE—Although Cameroon attracted the attention of the oil industry, its reserves were relatively limited. But the industry had other plans for Cameroon. Northeast of Cameroon, the landlocked nation of Chad was found to have plenty of oil. A consortium of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Elf Aquitaine drew up plans for a $3.7 billion project that would sink 300 wells in Chad and run the oil to the Atlantic coast via a 665-mile-long pipeline they would build across Cameroon. Because the regimes of both Biya and Chad’s Idriss Déby were notorious abusers of human rights, and because of the high potential for environmental degradation, Shell and Elf pulled out of the project. With billions of dollars of profits on the line, ExxonMobil found two new partners, Chevron and Petronas of Malaysia, and plunged ahead in promoting the plan. Construction of the pipeline, which began in October 2000, threatened the destruction of the lives of 100,000 Bagyeli Pygmies living in the region and in some cases their eviction. The World Bank backed the project, making it the bank’s single-largest investment in sub-Saharan Africa, and the pipeline was completed in July 2003.
_http://www.africasia.com/uploads/cameroon_0307_copy1.pdf
{Notice pic on the first page with Paul Biya and Jaques Chirac shaking hands}
The production of oil in Cameroon has had a chequered history. Output reached a peak of 164,000 barrels per day (bpd) in the mid 198o but then declined steadily until the late 1990s when the development of marginal fields led to a brief recovery. High expectations of new exploitable fields failed to materialise and as the existing fields matured, production continued to decline. In 2005, average production was 85,000 bpd. In 2004, Cameroon’s oil reserves were estimated at around 400m barrels.