Posted on Wednesday, June 14, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.
Congressman William Jefferson of Louisiana is currently under investigation by the FBI for allegedly taking bribes from a company seeking business in Nigeria and, as
I reported last week, the feds are apparently also looking at his ties to São Tomé and to some Americans doing business in that African country. Since then, I've received additional information that points even more strongly to a São Tomé-Jefferson connection.
It gets complicated, but stay with me. First I'll explain the history of a small energy firm called
ERHC, which was born in Lafayette, Louisiana but is now based in Houston. Next, I'll discuss a few people connected to the firm and to a second company called
Global Environmental Energy Corp. (GEEC), whose president, Noreen Wilson, has played a key role in ERHC. The cast of characters here includes a Texas wildcatter, a convicted felon, and a reverend whose company invested in an adult entertainment firm. Lastly, we'll get back to Jefferson, who has curious ties to both ERHC and GEEC.
It all starts in 1997, when ERHC—despite having no revenue and just a single full-time employee—won extensive energy rights in the tiny island nation of São Tomé. In exchange for a $5 million payment to the government for the right to market the country's oil potential, ERHC was awarded a minimum of four oil fields, exempted from all taxes, and granted half the future profits in STPetro, a state oil company created by the deal. Noreen Wilson, a lobbyist who helped negotiate the deal for ERHC and who became a major shareholder, was appointed to STPetro's board and made ERHC's chief financial officer.
In 2003, I wrote about ERHC's agreement in São Tomé for the Los Angeles Times. “Was the deal a little rich?” Wilson said in an interview. “Yeah, it probably was, but who else was going to take the risk back then? They couldn't give their oil away, let alone get someone to pay them for it.” But Andrew Latham of
Wood Mackenzie, an energy-consulting firm in Edinburgh, Scotland, said the original deal was far out of line with industry standards and said he'd never seen a company “get a stake like ERHC obtained in São Tomé.”
cont'd...
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