Posted on 04/19/2009 12:22:45 AM PDT by forkinsocket
On a cold, damp night last November, a Mercedes sedan looped through the semicircular drive of the St. James Paris, a century-old chateau-style hotel across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. As the car rolled to a halt at the hotel’s main entrance, a well- tailored trim man named Ely Calil walked unhurriedly out the lobby door and down wide stone steps, talking into an earpiece that was connected, through a thin black wire, to a tiny cell phone tucked in the closed palm of one hand. The driver stepped from the car and opened the door for Calil, who interrupted his conversation to give the driver instructions. He spoke in a voice a little above a whisper, perhaps just a touch softer than his normal cool, flat tone. The driver returned to his seat and steered the car out through the granite-pillared entryway and onto Avenue Bugeaud.
Calil had flown to Paris earlier that day from London, where he resides. Born in Nigeria in 1945 to a prominent family of Lebanese origin, Calil belongs to a small group of middlemen, a few dozen at most, who quietly grease the wheels of the global energy business, brokering transactions between oil companies and governments. The oil business operates on the basis of discreet payments, transfers, and backroom deals—not necessarily illegal— arranged by fixers like Calil. He has funneled money to African dictators to obtain concessions for oil companies, traded oil from Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and advised presidents and exiled political leaders. Along the way, he has not only amassed an immense personal fortune but has established a web of political ties stretching from Africa to the Middle East to the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at harpers.org ...
From one scam to another. I suppose he knows Al Gore.
the electric car is comong
“...carbon trading: buying the rights to pollute from cleaner businesses and selling them to dirtier ones.”
Yeah, that’s the way we’re gonna save the world.
Excellent find. Thanks.
Harpers regularly publishes fiction as fact.
Harpers could have substituted any valuable commodity and put together a story about insiders and traders. As an old N2 Group trader once said, “Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.”
And, if on one side you have the international oil companies, and on the other side a gang of third world dictators and sleazeballs who have the oil, how else are deals going to get done?
Anybody who thinks any dealing is going to be straightforward in this environment is terminally naive.
I do not disagree with your comment. Ely Calil is a real peson. Interesting read anyway.
The fish markets look great.
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