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French oil giant Total handed €500,000 fine over Iran corruption

A French court on Friday fined oil giant Total 500,000 euros ($575,000) for corruption after finding it guilty of paying bribes while bidding for a huge gas contract in Iran in 1997.

Published: 21 December 2018 16:07 CET
French oil giant Total handed €500,000 fine over Iran corruption
Photo: AFP
The French company was accused of paying $30 million in bribes to middlemen, in return for help in securing the rights to the South Pars natural gas field, the world's largest.
 
In 2013, Total paid $398 million in the US to settle similar charges arising in that country out of the joint French-US investigation.
   
The French part of the probe, which was launched back in 2006, initially covered both the 1997 South Pars deal, worth $2 billion, and the 1995 concession for the Sirri A and E oil fields.
   
Total was suspected of paying a total of $60 million in bribes between 1995 and 2004.
 
But in the end the multinational was only tried for the $30 million it paid in connection with South Pars after 2000, when a new French law on “corruption of foreign public officials” came into effect.
   
While convicting the company the court rejected prosecutors' call for it to seize 250 million euros in assets — investigators' estimate of the value of the proceeds of the corruption.
 
Total's late CEO Christophe de Margerie, who was head of Middle East exploration at the time of the payments, was also being investigated before his sudden death in a plane crash in Moscow in 2014.

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TOTAL

Fire erupts at France’s largest oil refinery

Firefighters brought a fire at the largest oil refinery in France under control Saturday, local officials said, hours after it started in the small hours of the morning.

Published: 14 December 2019 12:05 CET
Fire erupts at France's largest oil refinery
An automatic hose working to extinguish a flame at the Total oil refinery at Gonfreville-l'Orcher on Saturday. Photo: Jean-Francois Monier/AFP
The blaze broke out at one of Total's oil refineries near the port city of Le Havre, northwestern France, at 4am said officials at the prefecture of the Seine-Maritime region.
   
By dawn, smoke was pouring out across the region reaching as far as 10 kilometres (six miles) away. About 50 firefighters worked to bring the blaze under control.
   
A smell of hot tar hung over the zone, an AFP photographer noted, and although tests for air pollution near the plant were negative, for a few hours the prefecture advised residents to stay indoors.
   
In a statement they said a pump fault appeared to have caused the fire.
   
Total confirmed in its statement that the fire appeared to have been caused at a feed pump.
   
Nobody had been injured and all those at the site, which employs around 1,500 people, had been accounted for, it added.
   
But the incident comes only a day after safety officials approved the partial reopening of a factory in the northwest city of Rouen — which suffered a fire last September — over the objections of some local officials.
   
The blaze at the plant in Rouen on September 26 sent billowing clouds of soot as far as 22 kilometres away, prompting evacuations and school closures over potential health risks.
   
Both the factory at Rouen and the refinery near Le Havre are classified high-risk on the Seveso scale measuring industrial risk.
 
 
 
Tests for air pollution near the plant were negative but the prefecture advised residents to stay indoors.
   
Total said in a statement that no one was injured and that all those at the site, which employs around 1,500 people, have been accounted for.
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