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Gold/Mining/Energy : TLM.TSE Talisman Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Sladek who wrote (517)	10/27/1999 8:46:00 AM
From: Tomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1713

Sudan play bad timing for Talisman - Globe & Mail, Wednesday October 27 MADELAINE DROHAN Ottawa -- Jim Buckee, the chief executive officer of Talisman Energy Inc., must be scratching his head. For years, his Calgary-based oil company has operated in human rights hotspots such as Algeria and Indonesia. The Algerian government has waged a bloody campaign against internal dissidents. The world got a picture of what the Indonesian government was capable of with the brutal crackdown in East Timor earlier this year. If the Canadian government cared about Talisman's operations in either country, nothing was said publicly. Yet yesterday Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy took the unusual step of publicly expressing grave reservations about Talisman's involvement in Sudan. He did not stop there. Mr. Axworthy invited Mr. Buckee to come to Ottawa to discuss his company's Sudanese activities and to give assurances that those activities were not exacerbating the 43-year-old civil war in Sudan. Mr. Axworthy suggested that if he was not satisfied with the answers, the Canadian government would consider economic and trade sanctions that would make it difficult for a Canadian company to do business in Sudan. Mr. Buckee has to be asking himself: Why now? It boils down to bad timing on his part. The war between the north and south in Sudan had been going on for some time when Talisman decided last year to buy the Canadian company Arakis Energy, whose sole asset was a 25-per-cent share in the consortium developing major oil fields in Sudan. As mentioned earlier, Talisman was already operating in several countries with questionable human rights records. Other international oil companies had operated for years in places such as Nigeria and Angola, where oil revenues have fuelled civil wars. But Sudan has something these other countries do not: a reputation of being one of the few places left in the world where slavery is tolerated. Slavery is one of those hot-button issues that attracts media attention and campaigns by humanitarian organizations in equal measure. Mr. Buckee was wading into a public relations minefield from which there was no safe way out. The anti-slavery groups were already well organized before Talisman came on the scene. They realized, however, that putting pressure on other members of the consortium -- the state oil companies of China, Malaysia and Sudan -- was a lost cause. Talisman was a different story. It was a reputable oil company from a country that prided itself on its human rights record. In other words, it was fair game. Playing into this was the role Mr. Axworthy had taken on the world stage. He had been a high-profile member of the campaign to ban land mines. Canada's membership on the UN security council had given him a platform to champion a number of similar initiatives. Even as he was staking out Canada's claim to the moral high ground, he was getting an earful from the Americans about Talisman in Sudan. The United States has declared Sudan a terrorist state and forbids U.S. companies to do business there. On her swing through Africa last week, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with some of the southern Sudanese rebels who are fighting the northern government in Khartoum. She announced she planned to talk to the Canadians about Talisman's operations in Sudan. Mr. Axworthy's statement yesterday had been in the works long before Mrs. Albright's comments in Africa, although she may have helped speed the process along. Bad publicity surrounding slavery in Sudan, combined with an activist foreign minister and heavy U.S. pressure produced the statement yesterday that sounded very much like a naming and shaming of Talisman Energy. Mr. Buckee did not interpret it this way. He proclaimed himself delighted with the initiatives announced by Mr. Axworthy and said it was just the type of positive engagement in Sudan that Talisman had hoped for. There is a lot of misinformation about Sudan, Mr. Buckee said. He said the company will do all it can to help the Canadian mission Mr. Axworthy has asked to investigate allegations about human rights abuses and the practice of slavery. But here's the kicker. Mr. Axworthy's move may have come too late to affect the course of the war. Sudan needed Talisman for its pipeline expertise in order to design and help build the 1,600-kilometre pipeline from the oil fields in the south to the marine terminal at Port Sudan on the Red Sea. That pipeline was completed last summer and oil exports have begun. In an oil-hungry world, the Sudanese will find lots of buyers who are not too particular about where their oil comes from. China, which owns the majority share of the oil consortium, has just become a net oil importer and will have an increasing appetite for fuel. While the pipeline was still under construction, the Canadian government might have had some leverage through Talisman. But as Mr. Buckee has said a number of times, the project would go ahead with or without Talisman now. Madelaine Drohan can be reached by E-mail at mdrohan@globeandmail.ca