Chad's high court has ordered an oil consortium headed by
America’s ExxonMobil to pay $74 billion in fines for alleged unpaid taxes,
Bloomberg reports. The court has also demanded the oil giant pay $819 million
in overdue royalties. Exxon Mobil has been pumping oil in the African country
since 2003, operating a pipeline that delivers Chadian oil to Cameroon for
further export.
The record figure is almost five times the country’s GDP of
about $13 billion.
Experts say Chad is unlikely to see much of the money.
“Nobody is going to cooperate outside of Chad in enforcing
this judgment; this leaves Exxon exposed to possibly losing everything it has
inside Chad but that’s such an extraordinary number, I can’t imagine the assets
they have there are worth that much,” said Jeffery Atik, who teaches
international law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
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