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The End of the Pretence: Why a Hydrocarbons Law Cannot Legitimize the Plunder of a Nation

For decades, the language of law and contract has been used as a velvet glove to hide a theft. Governments and corporations found a comfortable fiction: draft a sectoral hydrocarbon law, ink production-sharing agreements, and claim that all flows from extraction to export rest on legal foundations. But legality is not a costume you wear to hide lawlessness. A law that governs production does not, and cannot by itself, legitimize the commercial expropriation of a nation’s wealth. When sale, transfer and payment are permitted in practice while the commercial architecture — the code, the institutions, the checks and balances — is absent, what remains is not commerce: it is pillage with paperwork.

In Equatorial Guinea the gap between extraction and accountable exchange is not a mistake; it is the mechanism by which public wealth is siphoned into private vaults abroad. Hydrocarbons legislation may set the technical terms of production and the state’s share on paper, but when there is no independent commercial law, no transparent registry, and no functioning public audit — when contracts and exports are channelled under opaquely authorized decrees and payments land in offshore accounts — then the state’s signature becomes an instrument to enable transnational plunder. That signature cannot cloak illegality. It magnifies it.

This is not rhetorical exaggeration. It is a sequence of legal and factual claims that can be demonstrated and verified:

1. Structural Legal Void: A legitimate market requires legal frameworks that govern contracting, sales, fiscal responsibility, customs, and commercial dispute resolution. A hydrocarbon statute that addresses extraction but leaves the rules of sale, transfer and transparency undefined or discretionary produces legal vacuums that empower arbitrary acts.

2. Institutional Capture: Where executive fiat substitutes for independent adjudication, where approvals are ministerial and unrecorded, the institutions necessary to verify, register and audit commercial transactions are absent or corruptible. The result is that the state apparatus rubber-stamps transfers that never meaningfully benefit the population.

3. Offshore Flows and Beneficial Owners: Payments routed to accounts in banking secrecy jurisdictions, layered through opaque corporate structures, and controlled ultimately by hidden beneficial owners are hallmarks of illicit financial flows. They create a trail that is difficult to follow but not impossible — and the existence of such trails is prima facie evidence of misappropriation that should trigger forensic inquiry.

4. Violations of International Standards: The UNCAC, OECD guidance, AML frameworks and international norms on extractive-sector transparency require that resource revenues be subject to public accounting, beneficial ownership disclosure, and mechanisms that prevent conflict of interest and corruption. Where states fail to meet these obligations, the international community has both the right and the duty to act.

5. Moral and Political Legitimacy: Legitimacy is not a bookkeeper’s term alone. It is the social contract between rulers and the ruled. When public wealth is removed without trace and the people receive none of its benefits in health, education, infrastructure or security, the political compact erodes. The regime’s claim to govern in the people’s interest becomes empty.

The remedy cannot be private vigilantism or theatrical denunciation. The remedy must be rigorous, legal, and global:

• Forensic Audit: A coordinated, independent audit of all extractive-sector contracts, production volumes, and export receipts, performed by a reputable international auditing body with access to banking records via mutual legal assistance.
• Beneficial Ownership Disclosure: Mandatory and immediate publication of beneficial owners of all entities involved in extraction, export, trading, and midstream operations.
• Targeted Asset Tracing and Recovery: Identification and restraint of assets linked to illicit flows in foreign jurisdictions through mutual legal assistance and civil recovery processes.
• Sanctions and Visa Measures: Carefully targeted sanctions against individuals credibly implicated in large-scale diversion of public funds, consistent with human-rights and anti-corruption law.
• Judicial Mechanisms: Referral of well-documented cases to competent criminal and civil jurisdictions where evidence supports prosecution or restitution claims.
• Transparent Public Accounting: Publication of all state hydrocarbon revenue flows, allocation of funds, and spending audits for citizen oversight and parliamentary review.

If the state’s apparatus has been used to simulate commercial legitimacy while facilitating outflows of national wealth, the international community and financial institutions are not innocent bystanders; they are potential facilitators. Banks, traders, legal advisers, and logistics firms that accept payments and cargo without adequate due diligence shoulder complicity when their acceptance enables theft.

The enforcement community — financial regulators, law enforcement, and anti-corruption agencies — must move from reluctant observation to decisive action.

To those who argue that contracts and laws are enough to confer legality I say this: legality is a living structure that depends on rules, institutions and enforceable obligations. A contract signed into a vacuum of commercial law, executed through shadowed channels and paid into secrecy jurisdictions to private and individual bank accounts, cannot convert theft into trade. The instruments of law cannot be deployed as instruments of deception without being reclassified for what they are.

This is not a call for vendetta. It is an invitation to accountability. It is a legal, moral, and civic imperative: to restore the link between a country’s natural wealth and the well-being of its people. To the international legal community, to financial regulators, to civil society, to investors concerned with ESG and rule of law: the facts are in plain sight. The time to act is now.

And to the citizens whose lives are eroded by emaciated public services and hollowed-out institutions: document. Preserve. Demand transparency. Use the law, the global mechanisms, the media, and peaceful civic action to reclaim what was never theirs to give.

This article is not theatre. It is not partisan performance. It is a legal and ethical dossier in narrative form — meant to mobilize lawful actors to apply the instruments available under international law to end the simulation of market legitimacy and restore real accountability. The rule of law cannot coexist with legalized plunder. When the instruments of commerce are used as tools of theft, those instruments must be reclaimed for justice.

I remain at your full disposal to arrange a private consultation.

With respect and determination,

Javier Clemente Engonga-Owono Nguema™
President – The United States of Africa™
🌍 www.africaunited.online