Perenco is a massive independent fossil-fuel company that specialises in buying oil infrastructure near the end of its life from companies like BP and Shell, to squeeze the last drops of profit out of them.
A report published last week after four years of research by the Environment Investigation Agency (EIA) alleges that the company often leaves extensive environmental damage in its trail, and it subjects workers to unacceptable safety risks.
In Gabon (West Africa), the Perenco Group was already accused of massive environmental destruction over many years of operating there, but last year a fire on the offshore oil platform Becuna led to the death of five Gabonese drilling operatives and a French Perenco manager.
The EIA spoke to several whistleblowers who described that there were multiple problems on the platform, with dangerous oil surges just two weeks before, but that work continued despite warnings of a dilapidated and unsafe site with inadequate safety equipment. They describe the issues as compounded by the fact that senior staff in Gabon fear for their jobs due to a regime where if production is stalled they face dismissal from their London or Paris bosses.
There are further allegations of a cover-up after the event, with human remains swept in to the sea, bodies buried in unmarked graves, and a criminal investigation halted by corruption.
While the family of the French worker did receive compensation, the Gabonese families of the dead, and other injured workers there, have received nothing.
Perenco, like many large corporations, has a complicated structure of more than a hundred subsidiaries, and although having HQs in London and Paris, it is financially based in the Bahamas, thus minimising exposure to tax. Researchers claim that the structure also allows the company to leave death and destruction in its wake, averting the blame away from its central base and pointing to supposedly independent and autonomous entities in the countries affected. Whistleblowers allege that actually every decision is made centrally, along with continual pressure to cut corners and keep extracting, and that the responsibility goes right to the top.
The Perenco Group is owned by the Perrodo family, with car-racing enthusiast François Perrodo acting as Chair (when he’s not jetting round the world taking part in races for the pro/am AF Corse team).
Aside from the tragic and it seems thoroughly avoidable incident in Gabon, the ‘Death Behind Closed Doors’ report accuses Perenco of multiple crimes across the globe. From deforestation in Guatemala to multiple oil leaks on Indigenous land in Peru, from financial links with death squads in Columbia to chronic air, water and soil pollution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on and on research and interviews appear to uncover an out-of-control corporation putting profit before people wherever it operates.
Perenco’s lawyers responded to the report accusing it of bias and prejudice and offering no comment in response to 35 questions put to the company.
Extinction Rebellion’s protest attempted to shine some light on this little-known but apparently lawless corner of the fossil fuel extraction industry.
