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LONDON — Liz Truss pushed through $1.15 billion in U.K. taxpayer support for a Mozambique gas project now embroiled in allegations of abduction, murder and rape.
Truss’ moves to back the project as trade secretary in the spring of 2020 were opposed by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and many of her Conservative Cabinet colleagues.
Britain’s new Labour government is now weighing whether to continue to offer taxpayer-funded direct loans and guarantees to U.K. exporters and banks supporting French energy major TotalEnergies’ $20 billion liquefied natural gas project in northern Mozambique.
Last month POLITICO reported that a Mozambican military unit operating out of TotalEnergies’ gatehouse at the gas site in Cabo Delgado massacred at least 97 civilians.
The security of the region had been deteriorating since at least 2019 when ISIS-affiliated militants calling themselves al-Shabaab forced notorious Kremlin-linked Wagner Group mercenaries out of the area.
By June 2020 when Truss and her Cabinet colleagues were making their decision “it was clear to any reasonably well-informed observer … that the conflict was escalating and that the exploitation of gas reserves was one of the key drivers,” said Wolf-Christian Paes, a senior fellow in armed conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
But a former high-ranking official in Britain’s trade department, granted anonymity to speak candidly, recalled that while the Cabinet was concerned about the environmental impact of the project, and civil servants were “equivocal,” Truss was insistent.
She told civil servants to “find me a way to make it happen,” the official added.
Raped, tortured and killed
Just 10 months after Truss’ intervention, in April 2021, the project was brought to a halt as militants swept through the region, massacring more than 1,000 people.
In the summer that followed, a Mozambican commando unit, led by an officer who said his mission was to protect “the project of Total,” accused fleeing villagers of being Islamic insurgents and separated the men — a group of between 180 and 250 — from the women and children. At least one woman was gang raped.
The prisoners were then held in shipping containers on the TotalEnergies’ site for three months. They were beaten, shot, suffocated, starved, disappeared, tortured and killed. Only 26 survived.
“Mozambique LNG has no knowledge of the alleged events … and has never received any information indicating that such events took place,” TotalEnergies said in a statement.
This is “the latest news of atrocities to emerge from an area where the project is helping fuel an insurgency that has killed thousands and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes,” said Tony Bosworth, an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth. The NGO launched a failed legal challenge against U.K. government backing for the project in September 2020.
“There can be no doubt that the U.K. Cabinet was aware of the security situation in Cabo Delgado at that time,” said the IISS’ Paes. “Investing in an active zone of armed conflict is an extremely risky proposition.”
As Truss was considering backing the project in the spring of 2020, there was “a big debate at the time” within Cabinet about moving ahead with the $1.15 billion funding, the former senior official said. Those arguments were said to center on climate change.
The U.K. was about to host the U.N.’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow the following year and the project “became a totemic battle between those in government who wanted to proceed and those who didn’t,” the former senior official said.
On one side were Cabinet ministers who argued “‘the U.K. is a country committed to COP, to battling climate change, and it’s therefore not appropriate [that] taxpayers money be spent in this way,’” the official explained. “The other camp was saying, ‘no, no, [UK Export Finance] should be able to finance whatever it likes … lots of other countries are proceeding with this.’”
Truss “was very keen for this to go ahead,” the former official said. At the time, the trade secretary argued the U.K. “would be missing opportunities,” they said, if it didn’t back the project and that China would back it if Britain didn’t. “Liz was like: ‘no, no, we do this.’”
Truss declined to comment for this article.
‘A reputational risk to the UK’
On June 10, 2020, Truss, with then-Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s approval, signed off the $1.15 billion in funding for the TotalEnergies LNG project.
The support, which has not yet been drawn down, would be delivered by UK Export Finance, which underwrites loans from banks to U.K. firms working on the project and in some cases has also offered its own direct financing to those firms.
Truss’ decision to approve the project came after a flurry of letters of opposition from Cabinet colleagues, including Britain’s top business and international development ministers, according to documents released as part of a legal challenge.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab warned of the project’s “reputational risk” to Britain given the nation was due to host COP26 the following year and was seeking to encourage other nations to move away from fossil fuel investments.
Boris Johnson was “bounced” into approving the scheme as it was too advanced to cancel when he was told about it, The Times reported. “The PM was pretty furious and immediately asked for a review of UKEF’s policy on fossil fuel,” the newspaper cited a source as saying. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment.
But by December 2020 — months after Truss approved U.K. backing — Johnson ended future government finance for similar overseas fossil fuel projects.
Talks are now underway for force majeure — a contract clause which removes obligations on parties in the event of a disaster — to lift on the TotalEnergies project. The region is more stable now than in 2021, said Paes, following a military campaign by various Southern African Development Community nations supporting Mozambique’s government.
TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné has said he wants to restart the project by the end of 2024.
“We are currently in talks with project sponsors and other lenders regarding the latest status of the LNG production project in Mozambique and the potential for the force majeure situation to lift,” said a UK Export Finance spokesperson.
Campaigners continue to press for the money to be withdrawn.
“This project is a carbon time bomb that’s being associated with mass killings, rape and torture,” Friends of the Earth’s Bosworth said. “It’s unconscionable for the U.K. government to have anything to do with it.”
