The families of Americans killed in the bombing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 will protest Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s visit to New York this week. His United Nations counterparts may be more welcoming.
Qaddafi, who speaks at the UN tomorrow, has cemented ties with countries that shunned him for three decades and are now lured by Africa’s biggest oil reserves and a 150 billion-dinar ($123 billion), five-year government infrastructure-investment plan.
“With fewer and fewer sizable oil patches left, oil companies have incentives to acquire acreage wherever they can,” said Geoff Porter, the chief Africa and Middle East analyst for the Eurasia Group, a New York-based firm that analyzes political risks. For oil companies, doing business with a former pariah state “is worth it,” he said.
More than 40 foreign oil companies are working in Libya, including London-based BP Plc, Eni SpA of Rome, Irving, Texas- based Exxon Mobil Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp, which has headquarters in Los Angeles.
Qaddafi’s spending program is attracting companies such as Alcatel SA, which is based outside Paris, Munich-based Siemens AG, Milan’s Impregilo SpA and London-based Rentokil Initial Plc. Businesses from China, South Korea, Brazil and Turkey also are working in Libya, said Salah el-Houni, head of international exhibitions for Libyan media company Dar Alarab, sponsor of fairs in Tripoli for foreign firms.
“Because of the sheer size of the investment in infrastructure, it’s one of the most attractive business opportunities in the world,” said Antonio De Capoa, the chairman of the Italy-Libya Chamber of Commerce.
Libya, which took responsibility for the Lockerbie attack in 2003, holds the presidency of the 64th UN General Assembly. Qaddafi, 67, is scheduled to address the assembly immediately after President Barack Obama, who is the third speaker at the opening session.
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Outside the UN, family members of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 will be holding signs with “murderer” written above a picture of Qaddafi, according to Bob Monetti, whose 20-year- old son, Rick, was one of the 270 killed in the terrorist bombing.
“As long as Qaddafi sits on all this oil, he can do whatever he pleases and get away with it,” said Monetti, 66, a retired medical engineer in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. “There’s no morality in politics. Politics are about business, and in Libya, business is about oil.”
Qaddafi will be speaking a month after the only man convicted of the bombing was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds, sparking outrage in the US and political questions over UK business ties with Libya.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who is dying of prostate cancer, received a nationally televised hero’s welcome to Tripoli on his return from Scotland on Aug. 20. Obama called the scenes of his arrival “highly objectionable.”
Al-Megrahi has since been hospitalised as he prepares an appeal, the BBC reported September 12, citing his brother.
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who said he was “repulsed” by the greeting, was forced to deny intervening in Scotland’s decision to release him after political opponents accused him of seeking to curry favor with Qaddafi.
The world’s relations with Qaddafi, who took power in 1969 and came under US and UN sanctions in the 1980s and 1990s, have improved since he abandoned a nuclear-arms program and renounced terrorism between 2002 and 2005.
During that period, in 2004, Siemens, Germany’s largest engineering company, won an order worth ¤180 million ($264 million) to upgrade Libya’s power-supply grid after a visit by then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Former UK premier Tony Blair visited Libya in May 2007 when BP, Europe’s second-biggest oil producer, signed an accord to conduct a $900 million exploration programme with Libya’s National Oil Corp.
By December of that year, Qaddafi was pitching the Bedouin- style tent he uses while traveling in Paris as a guest of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said the Libyan would sign $15 billion worth of contracts. Toulouse, France-based Airbus SAS at the same time confirmed an order for 15 aircraft from Libyan Airlines.
Last year, Qaddafi paid a final installment in a compensation package to Lockerbie families, clearing the way for normalising relations with the US, and settled a dispute over Italy’s colonization of Libya from 1911 to 1943.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi agreed to build a $5 billion coastal highway as part of the agreement. Berlusconi visited Qaddafi last month to mark its anniversary.
Obama became the first US president to meet and shake hands with Qaddafi during a summit of global leaders in Italy in June. The handshake took place 23 years after Ronald Reagan, who called Qaddafi the “mad dog of the Middle East,” ordered the bombing of the colonel’s compound, among other targets.
“Qaddafi has been very successful at engaging the West,” said Dana Moss, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He’s been able to remain in power, and at the same time develop the country’s oil and gas industry.”
Libya, a country of 6.3 million, counts on oil exports for a quarter of its gross domestic product, which was about $100 billion last year, according to the CIA Factbook. Proved oil reserves amount to 45 billion barrels, it said. That equates to $3.13 trillion at the current price of about $69.50 per barrel.
The country has 5 billion barrels of untapped oil, or about 12 per cent of its total reserves, and is seeking to boost output to 3 million barrels a day from 1.8 million now, the government said this month.
Italy has more than tripled its oil imports from Libya since sanctions were lifted in 2003 and the African country now provides about 30 per cent of Italy’s daily oil needs.
Oil is also financing Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, the Libyan Investment Authority, which has $80 billion to spend, the fund’s chairman, Abdulhafid Zlitni, told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper in February.
Libya’s central bank last year bought a 4.6 per cent stake in UniCredit SpA, Italy’s biggest bank.
Libya may increase its stake in Italian oil company Eni to 10 per cent from less than 2 per cent now, Shokri Ghanem, the former head of the National Oil Corp, said in May.
As politicians greet Qaddafi and companies jockey for Libya’s riches, Monetti grows more disgusted.
“This man has left a trail of death all over the world” he said. “And they treat him like he’s a normal person.”