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The Lundin debate needs to be cleaned up

Before yesterday’s AGM, Tredje AP-fonden had sided with the rebels among the institutional shareholders. The impertinent group that was demanding an independent enquiry into the company’s activities in southern Sudan around the turn of the century.

 

The pension fund did admittedly finally abstain when the AGM determined the matter yesterday.

But its involvement is interesting. Because, at the same time as the fund is concerned about what Lundin might have done 10 years ago, it is not worried about owning 710,000 shares in a company forming part of the Chinese state oil company CNPC, which never left southern Sudan and alone is running most of the oil industry in the new country.

 

CNPC boasts about its good relations with Sudan’s dictator, whose ethnic cleansing in Darfur was financed by Chinese oil money.

CNPC’s oilfields are still causing conflict, with almost daily battles now. The company’s allies in Khartoum want to retain control over the black gold which has accrued to the new state of South Sudan.

 

Civil war is about to break out again, with a link to Swedish pension funds.

This should be a major problem for Tredje AP-fonden. But for the pension fund there only exist those problems that have been mentioned in the media. It is difficult to interpret the selective concerns of the institutional shareholders other than that they see the Lundin debate as a golden opportunity for displaying an integrity that was easily come by.

The “independent” investigation they fought in vain for would scarcely have made any difference.

 

When an investigation into a company has been instigated by the AGM of that company, it can never be really independent.

What is more, it is in all likelihood merely certain representatives of Lundin who know what insight the company may have had into the atrocities.

If the company is guilty of irregularities, then the need to inform an internal enquiry of these does not seem to be especially pressing.

There is no doubt that the return of the oil industry to Sudan in the 1990s did add fuel to the fire of the civil war. It is also clear that a violent expulsion of the population has been one strategy on the part of Khartoum to protect oil extraction in hostile areas, where, for example, Lundin Oil would never have been able to operate without the protection of the regime.

 

But there is nothing directly proving that Lundin Oil was aware of excesses, even less to indicate that the company was actively complicit.

It is just as likely that representatives of Lundin will be convicted of crimes against international law in southern Sudan as it is that Carl Bildt will emerge as a Left Party member just in time for the next (Swedish) election.

 

The weak position as regards proof does not however prevent debaters from claiming the company's absolute guilt.

Aftonbladet’s Eva Franchell claimed the other day that Lundin Oil themselves “cleared the villages around the oilfields”.

 

This phrase was removed after criticism, but in the Internet article it still claims that Lundin has been accused by Human Rights Watch of “engaging a notorious warlord” for “acts of ethnic cleansing”, which would be sensational were it to be true.

 

Lundin is a particularly amoral oil company, but in the debate it has become something greater – a symbol of the world's evil. As the company is considered to be so evil, the details are unimportant. The company has countered all criticism with massive arrogance. But that does not excuse the sloppiness involved in the indignation.

 

As long as there is no conclusive proof, there is reason to lower the tone a little. The lobbying campaign seems to be more and more about the narcissism of journalists and less and less about the still tormented people of South Sudan.