Somaliland: Waddani Criticizes Government deal with Trafigura

Waddani political party castigated the government of Somaliland for sneaking in an internationally tarnished commodities and oil trading company without adequately explaining why there was a need for its services or why such services were not openly and justly tendered in the market before signing an agreement.

Khadar Hussein Abdi ‘Looge’, the General-Secretary of the Waddani opposition party, stated, Monday, how Trafigura Group Pte was given a number of unpublicized concessions relating to the import of oil and the management of the Berbera oil terminal was unacceptable.

He said the deal smacked of corruption and greed the likes of which had often been linked with authoritarian dictators of the world.

Khadar argued that better states collapsed when greed dictated the order of the day in governance.

The GS quoted a report by Foreign Policy which he said illustrated the former Egyptian President, Husni Mubarak, who had – along with other family members – unfairly amassed US$70 billion.

This happened he said when leaders only saw through the throat.

“When leaders flaunt the constitution of its country and oversight mechanisms curbing corruption, the fate of that country does not a guru to be identified. It will end up a failed state,” he said.

Mr Looge said that it was downright reprehensible and so clearly illegal that the government of Somaliland, through its Ministry of Trade, moon over the virtues of a company that had been found guilty by international courts in so many counts of shady deals including trade in toxic waste dumping.

“It is so comical to see a government minister (trade) so taken by how big and international Trafigura was when even the oil it brought wasn’t the government’s but the company’s,” he said.

Looge said the government has knowingly and blatantly abrogated all rules and regulations laid for fair dealing in tenders and contracts however big or small they were.

“The government admits that even the oil in the tanker’s holds was not its and that the proceeds of the sale were the company’s; and the Minister neither produced terms of the agreement with the company nor how – as he said – Trafigura was going to further develop the Berbera Oil Terminal regarding specifics, costs, timeframe and so on,” he said.

Ironically, the President of the Republic of Somaliland ‘nationalized‘ the BOT in Decree No.JSL/XM/WM/222-178/082018 of August 2018, annulling the management lease of local oil importers who ran it since 2015 when the former government revoked a TOTAL license and leased the terminal to the businessmen.

On 3 September a Trafigura tanker docked in Berbera. The government ecstatically extolled Trafigura and how the unrecognized republic was attracting big multinationals whose business with the country was tantamount to ‘recognition’.

The arrival of the tanker was heralded in by a barrage of news copies promoting Trafigura, the ‘Low sulfur gas oil’ it brought to Berbera, and how the arrival of such a multinational was a boost to a recognition-hungry country.

Some of the PR copies even claimed that the Trafigura deal was even larger, potentially more beneficial to Somaliland.

This kind of assertion only added to the perplexities creating all sorts of questions and suppositions nobody was ready to elucidate with government voices only to the mystery.

Of course, the company apparently exploited – and obviously banked on – a low intellect, low capacity for research on the part of concerned government officials and the parliament additionally relying on an agreement already rushed through government corridors, sidestepping the National Tender Board and ‘constricting’ regulations.

Thus far, the field has been Trafigura’s by default.

The suspicions surrounding the arrival of Trafigura generated a debate on social media as well as a variety of coverages with the usual mixture of pros versus cons.  A post on Facebook and a clip which had attracted attention came from Mohamed Hassan Diridewa and Ma Guuraan, respectively. The first post questioned the legitimacy of the government deal with Trafigura. The second more boldly linked the President and his family to the company and the circumstances heralding its arrival.

The General-secretary’s words, however, constitute the most cogent whistleblow on what a great number of perplexed intellectuals and law-makers were silently asking themselves.

The scandals Trafigura, registered in Singapore (1993),  has been involved in were adequately covered by over a dozen reports big media names such as the Financial Times and The Guardian as well as institutions such as Amnesty International published over the years.

The reports established that pariah companies,, such as Trafigura preyed on countries and administrations whose respect for law, order, legitimacy, and fair dealing were way low down in their list of priorities – if at all.

Below is a cross-section of this particular company’s unearthed escapades