But as an investor in PetroChina, a subsidiary of CNPC, the state-owned Chinese oil company which is complicit in some of the worst scorched earth policies in Sudan, it risks its reputation as a professed corporate champion of human rights. BP was the first multinational to sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and a signatory to a new voluntary code to stop oil company security forces violating human rights. PetroChina was created with a firewall to prevent funds invested in it from flowing back to the parent corporation - in violation of the US embargo on investment in Sudan and in response to criticism of any link to Sudanese operations. But this firewall cannot be guaranteed. Chinese state-owned corporations are notoriously secretive and unaccountable.
Fungibility is the central issue.
Shell owns an oil refinery in Port Sudan. Evidence of human rights atrocities from the UN, Amnesty International, the Canadian government s Harker comission and numerous other authoritative sources have been ignored. It claims that it is a force for peace . Sweden s family-owned firm, Lundin Oil, is only now returning to Sudan after pulling out early last year due to logistical difficulties . The oil road, allegedly paid for by Lundin, which is vital to the success of Lundin s exploitation of the concession, has been accompanied by aerial bombardments, attacks by troops and the burning of villages and killing of civilians, say local chiefs.