Sonangol’s Billion-Dollar Headache

Evidence has reached Maka Angola that Sonangol’s debts to major oil corporations are far in excess of the US $300 million  owed to Chevron as reported last month. Faced with a Sonangol news release that noted the Chevron monies were “under review” prior to payment, other foreign creditors have grown anxious about the multi-million sums they too are owed. Maka Angola has been supplied with figures showing unpaid cash calls to three other oil majors operating in the Angolan oilfields. They reveal that as of October 2016, Sonangol owed its creditors at over one billion US dollars. To date, Sonangol has only effected payments to companies owned by associates of President José Eduardo dos Santos and his daughter, Isabel dos Santos, the current Sonangol President. President dos Santos sacked the previous Sonangol board and installed his daughter back in June, in a move that shocked the global oil industry given […]

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The Chevron Ultimatum: Sonangol Has One Week to Save Itself

New management at the Angolan National Oil Company Sonangol has engineered a situation which now threatens the very survival of the company. Since June this year, when Angola’s President José Eduardo dos Santos installed his daughter Isabel dos Santos to chair the board, Sonangol has repeatedly failed to honour its promises to pay some US $300 million owed to the US multinational oil giant Chevron. The sum relates to production costs for the lucrative Block 0 in Angola’s offshore oilfields, which is 40 percent owned by Sonangol and 39.2 percent owned by Chevron. Sources in Houston have told Maka Angola that the US company has exhausted all options for finding an amicable solution, with no reciprocity from Isabel dos Santos’s board. The result is that Chevron Angola’s Director-General John Baltz has now given the Sonangol board an ultimatum: they have one week to come up with a payment plan or […]

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Chevron’s Misplaced Endorsement of Nepotism in Angola

What must Chevron’s CEO John Watson be thinking as he sits in his office in San Ramon, California and ponders the future of his Angolan subsidiary, the Cabinda Gulf Oil Company Ltd (Cabgoc)? How much longer does he estimate that he needs to keep on the good side of José Eduardo dos Santos’s corrupt and kleptocratic MPLA government to ensure Cabgoc can continue to operate?  Is he hedging his bets?  Or is he staking Chevron’s African corporate future on the faint chance that the Dos Santos family and their acolytes will not be brought to justice for their crimes? While oil industry analysts around the globe were divided about the merit of the President’s nepotistic appointment of his daughter Isabel to head the restructured Angolan state oil company, Sonangol,  Watson’s man in Angola, the Cabgoc director John Baltz, was telling a US-Angola Chamber of Commerce conference that he was “optimistic” […]

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The Road to Dialogue or Things Fall Apart in Angola

Last Friday, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution paving the way for Angola to be promoted from a low to middle income country by 2020. This resolution is cause for celebration by the government, for it is an international endorsement of its stewardship of the country. From 2003 to 2013, the country’s oil revenues reached over US $450 billion, according to Angolan economic estimates, and for a decade it ranked among the ten fastest growing economies in the world. Meanwhile, the timing of the UN resolution seems to be a twist of irony for ordinary Angolan citizens. It comes at a time when the bust of the oil fueled economic boom is all too evident on the supermarket shelves, and poverty is on the rise. Food shortages are becoming severe in parts of the country, while in the capital retailers are imposing rationing of certain products. […]

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Freedom of Expression: a Crime against the State Security in Angola

In the oil-rich enclave of Cabinda, in the northernmost part of Angola, three individuals share a prison cell, since March 14, charged with crimes against the state security and sedition, for a protest against bad governance and human rights abuses, which never took place.  Their arrests and the charges leveled against them,  are what illustrate the sophistication of the authoritarian rule in Angola. Members of the state security arrested Marcos Mavungo, a university lecturer and oil worker for Chevron, as soon as he exited the Catholic Church where he attended morning mass at 7h00. He was, in fact, the lead proponent of the protest.  The local government swiftly prohibited holding the protest the moment it was notified by the organizers several days before. The demonstration was supposed to be held in the afternoon but the ban, and the massive deployment of police officers in the small urban district of Cabinda […]

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Water for Chevron and a Lesson for the Government

A U.S oil multinational, Chevron, recently kick-started a new venture in Luanda’s most affluent residential area, Talatona:  a water well for the consumption of its employees. The first well for the rich, privileged and expats, in a luxury gated community, is about to pump water to the 100 houses of Condomínio Monte Belo (Beautiful Heights), where most of Chevron’s expat employees live.  Since the August 31 elections, the Angolan capital, Luanda, a sprawling urban chaos with more than five million people, has been plagued by severe water and electricity shortages. Monte Belo is one of the extravagantly expensive gated communities that have mushroomed south of Luanda and it is worth over US $250 million. Chevron commissioned the real estate project to the Brazilian construction multinational Odebrecht, in a joint-venture with a local private company Sakus Empreendimentos e Participações, set up by Sonangol oil executives. Sakus is currently fronted by Mirco […]

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