Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption by Patrick Alley

Author:Patrick Alley [Alley, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913183516
Publisher: Octopus
Published: 2022-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

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* When we called them, McAfee & Taft denied that TNO was a customer of the firm and said the firm did not have direct knowledge of the transactions, which must have been on behalf of another client.

5

AN ODOUR OF SULPHUR

YEKEPA, NORTHEASTERN LIBERIA, 2006

My shirt stuck to my back in the tropical heat as I stood among the dereliction of the deserted iron-ore mine in the shadow of Mount Nimba. Long denuded of tropical rainforest, which had been felled decades before, these hills were now covered in coarse grasses and provided a stark backdrop to the scars and remnants of the hope that had once existed here. The only sounds came from the insects hovering in front of my face and the breeze whistling through the old mine workings.

As I picked my way through heaps of rusting machinery, I narrowly missed falling into a massive hole where the ground fell away into subterranean darkness; the steel girders that lined the old mine shaft fading into an eerie gloom, like a motorway into a dystopian underworld. With no guard rail between me and oblivion, I felt that tingling grip of fear somewhere between my loins and my stomach and involuntarily stepped back. Behind me, the vast yellow hulks of the trucks once used to haul away the valuable minerals that were mined here were slowly disintegrating, stripped long ago of everything removable and rotted by a quarter of a century of tropical rains, sun and wind.

I was in Liberia with two Global Witness colleagues, Natalie Ashworth and Sofia Goinhas, and our old Liberian friend and campaigning partner from the civil war days, Silas Siakor. We were there to investigate a massive mining deal struck between the government of Liberia and Mittal Steel, owned by the UK’s richest man. Most of our work required immersing ourselves in the labyrinthine legalese of mining contracts and tracking the movement of profits through different tax havens: structures designed to minimize taxes paid in Liberia and to maximize profits for the company. The trip to the derelict mine site helped us understand the situation on the ground. And it helped us understand something else too.

Like almost everything in Liberia, Yekepa had been shattered by 15 years of civil war that had ended just three years previously. The company that had brought wealth to the region had long gone, leaving the surviving remnants of the workforce and their families occupying the mouldering two-room bungalows built for them in the 1960s, on the fringes of what was now a ghost town. As in Buchanan, broad and once proud thoroughfares lined with telegraph poles, stripped of the copper wires that had brought power to the town, were being reclaimed by the jungle, while the overgrown tennis courts, empty, refuse-filled swimming pools and deserted company buildings, their walls encrusted with the black mould of the tropics, were a cruel reminder of better times. Before the carnage.

To our north, beyond the mine tailings, rusting machinery and the skeletal remains of the mine buildings, lay the remote forest-covered mountains of southern Guinea.

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