Thursday, November 9 2023 11:43

ArmInfo.BP's fossil fuel projects in Azerbaijan have helped fund the military aggression  against Karabakh Armenians though the transfer to billions of dollars to the Azerbaijan government since 2020, The Guardian reports quoting a campaign group as claiming.

Global Witness said Azerbaijan's share of two large oil and gas  projects operated by the British oil company had earned its  government more than four times its military spending since 2020, the  year that war broke out in the disputed territory of  Nagorno-Karabakh.

Analysis by the NGO suggested that Azerbaijan's economic reliance on  BP, its largest foreign investor, had indirectly helped to fund  Azerbaijan's military aggression against ethnic Armenians in the  contested region, which has forced more than 100,000 people to flee  the territory since early September.

In the same month senior figures representing BP, including its  chair, Helge Lund, and former chief executive John Browne, visited  Baku to attend the 100th birthday celebrations of Azerbaijan's late  former president Heydar Aliyev and reiterate its commitment "to  long-term partnership with Azerbaijan", according to a company  statement.

BP has supplied Baku with oil and gas worth almost $35bn (œ28.6bn)  since 2020 under a "production- sharing agreement".

Aliyev's son, Ilham Aliyev, became president after his father's death  in 2003 after an election that observers from the Organisation for  Security and Cooperation in Europe claim fell short of international  standards.

Dominic Eagleton, senior campaigner at Global Witness, said: "BP's  longstanding partnership with the Aliyev 'dictatorship' has funded  Azerbaijan's militarisation and aggression against Armenia. BP has  been happy to keep drilling, having learned nothing from the historic  mistake it made in Russia."

BP abandoned a stake of almost 20% in the Russian oil company  Rosneft, at a cost of $24bn to the company, following the Kremlin's  invasion of Ukraine after the UK government expressed concerns over  BP's links to the company given its role in providing fuel for  Russia's military effort.

"Funding violent dictators is always a bad strategy," Eagleton said.

BP last week posted weaker than expected profits of $3.3bn for the  third quarter, compared with $8.2bn in the same months last year,  prompting speculation that its sluggish share price and boardroom  upheaval could make it a takeover target.

A spokesperson for BP said the company has "been present in  Azerbaijan for three decades and we remain committed to operating a  safe, reliable, and resilient energy business in the region".

Under an agreement struck between BP and the Azerbaijan government in  the 1990s, the oil company is required to hand a share of the fossil  fuels it produces from these projects to the state.

This type of arrangement is commonplace in the oil and gas industry  as a way to share the risk and reward of developing fossil fuel  projects between foreign companies and the host state.

BP holds the largest share of Azerbaijan's oil and gas projects  alongside other foreign oil companies, including the US firm Exxon  Mobil, Norway's Equinor and the Russian company Lukoil, which hold  small minority stakes in the projects.

BP's financial disclosures show it has supplied Baku with oil and gas  worth almost $35bn on the global market since 2020. This sum is more  than four times the government's military spending over the same  period, which reached $7.9bn, according to the Stockholm  International Peace Research Institute.

"We support a peaceful settlement to the conflict and hope that a  final resolution will soon be found," the BP spokesperson added.  Browne did not respond to requests for comment.

Armenia's prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has alleged the ethnic  Armenian exodus amounted to "a direct act of an ethnic cleansing and  depriving people of their motherland". The claim was strongly  rejected by Azerbaijan's foreign ministry, which said that the mass  migration by the region's residents was a "personal and individual  decision and has nothing to do with forced relocation".