A major two- year investigation by EarthRights International has found further, compelling evidence linking oil giants Total and Chevron to forced labour, killings, and high-level corruption in Burma.
The important report, called Total Impact, documents how Total and Chevron’s highly controversial Yadana gas project has generated just under $5 billion for the ruthless military junta in Burma. The pipeline transports gas from the Andaman Sea through dense rainforest to the Thai border.
Along the pipeline corridor, Earth Rights have documented systematic and sustained abuse by the Burmese military since it was built in the mid-nineties. For this new report, photographs and interviews with hundreds of villagers in the area of the pipeline, reveal continued forced labour, killings and violations of property rights and freedom of movement. The report is full of heart-felt testimony:
“We can no longer do farming around our village because we don’t have existing land [anymore],” said one villager whose land was confiscated by Total and Chevron’s security forces.
In the good old fashioned genre of investigative journalism and the concept of “following the money”, the report argues that the junta manages to avoid including almost all its dollar gas revenues in the national budget by using an artificially low exchange rate. This way it calculates its revenue as just 6 kyat to the dollar when the real rate is closer to 1,000. The report says that at these rates, the regime has listed just $29m of its earnings while around $4.8bn is unaccounted for.
“The military elite are hiding billions of dollars of the peoples’ revenue in Singapore while the country needlessly suffers under the lowest social spending in Asia,” said ERI Burma Project Coordinator Matthew Smith, a principal author of the reports.
Despite this Chevron and Total continue to tell investors that there is no relationship between the pipeline and the junta.
ERI is calling Chevron and Total to publish all the payments they have made to the Burmese military. They are calling on the international community to apply targeted multilateral pressure to block misappropriated revenues from international capital markets and to restrict transactions to and from the relevant accounts.
– from priceofoil.org