Posts Tagged ‘steve levine’
What the Chinese can tell Russia about murder
If China can detain the wife of a top politician on suspicion of murdering a British businessman, can there be hope that Russia will adjudicate the jailhouse death of Sergei Magnitsky? What about the elevator execution of journalist Anna Politkovskaya? Or the nuclear-isotope poisoning of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko?
Beijing has detained Gu Kailai, the wife of now-disgraced Communist Party official Bo Xilai, on suspicion of murdering Neil Heywood, a long-time British business associate whose body was found in a Chongqing hotel Nov. 15. At first, Chinese authorities blamed alcohol poisoning, but yesterday they said he was murdered.
The hard facts are clear, most experts agree — this is a real murder, and authorities suspect that Gu and a servant played a role in it. But the rest is politics, said Chris Johnson, a former senior analyst on China for the CIA, and now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Johnson told me that Bo crossed an invisible line: He had seemed destined to be elevated to the all-powerful standing committee of the Communist Party Politburo. But he had created powerful enemies along the way, and ultimately self-destructed when a senior aide fled into a U.S. Consulate on Feb. 6, and divulged details of Bo’s corrupt dealings, and the Heywood murder. Breaking the law and common decency are one thing when you are a senior Chinese official, but it appears that having it aired very publicly is quite another.
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Is BP’s latest fiasco evidence of Russian law or Russian chess?
Are we to believe President Dmitry Medvedev, who says that the collapse of BP’s blockbuster oil deal in Russia is all a simple matter of the rule of law — that CEO Bob Dudley was violating a contract, and that isn’t done in Russia? One might reply, Since when? But this is what is baffling about the latest turn in BP’s long saga of suffering — one does not know whether Russia has suddenly gone legal, or whether we are watching a dimension of the run-up to the country’s 2012 presidential election.
For BP, this was all about recovering its mettle from last year’s disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Earning street cred in Big Oil isn’t the same as a lot of other businesses — there is comparatively little in the way of razzamatazz, branding or product breakthroughs. Instead, it’s all about being quick off the mark in acquiring property and finding hydrocarbons. Yet even there, as BP has learned, the going isn’t what it used to be: Dudley was plenty fast pivoting off the spill, and obtaining a superlatively rich new deal to help develop Russia’s Arctic. The details were tantalizing — already the most active Big Oil company on the Russia patch, BP would double-down by forming a marriage-type arrangement with state-owned Rosneft. The two companies would swap a significant number of shares, and then explore the extravagantly rich oil fields of the Arctic. Tens of billions of barrels of oil were at stake, and at once BP seemed to be back in the game.
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