Unaoil’s Huge New Corporate Bribery Scandal, Explained
On Wednesday, The Huffington Post and our Australian partner Fairfax Media published the results of a months-long investigation into Unaoil, a mysterious Monaco-based firm registered in the British Virgin Islands.
Unaoil and its subcontractors bribed foreign officials to help major multinational corporations win contracts, tens of thousands of the company’s internal documents show. The investigation illustrates just how complicit big Western companies are in corruption overseas. It also shows that by enabling corruption, these companies fuel the kind of political instability that allows insurgencies like the self-described Islamic State to grow.
It’s a complicated story, so we’re explaining it all for you here.
What is Unaoil?
Unaoil says that it provides international clients with “industrial solutions to the energy sector in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.” Its business is “very basic,” founder Ata Ahsani said. “What we do is integrate western technology with local capability.” But the emails suggest that Unaoil’s business plan was far more complicated.
Who’s in charge?
Unaoil is controlled by the wealthy Ahsani family of Monaco. Its patriarch, Ata Ahsani, was in the engineering business in Iran before the 1979 revolution. Like many secular and relatively wealthy Iranians, he left to establish a life in the West. By 1991, he had set up Unaoil. Today, he is its chairman. The CEO is his son Cyrus, a noted Monaco socialite who serves as treasurer of the small nation-state’s Ambassadors Club, whose honorary president is Prince Albert II. Saman Ahsani, Cyrus’ brother, is Unaoil’s COO and a prominent figure in London’s Iranian expatriate community.
Which companies worked with Unaoil?
American companies Halliburton, Honeywell, KBR and FMC Technologies; Korean manufacturers Samsung and Hyundai; U.K.-based Rolls-Royce; and Germany-based Man Turbo all worked with Unaoil, according to internal documents. So did hundreds of other firms, according to an internal Unaoil spreadsheet.
What is HuffPost basing its stories on?
HuffPost and Fairfax Media obtained tens of thousands of internal Unaoil documents, most of which are dated between 2003 and 2012. Fairfax writes that the source or sources who provided the documents “never asked for money.”
“What they wanted was for some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in government and companies across the globe to be exposed for acting corruptly, and with impunity, for years,” Fairfax Media explains. Want to know more about how this investigation came to be? Reporter Nick McKenzie has the story.
Why does this matter?
This type of corruption leads to political instability, undermines trust in already distrusted governments, makes business unpredictable, and helps terrorists.
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