Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of the award-winning “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO. Russia’s shadow fleet just won’t go away. Countries in the Baltic Sea region have tried virtually every legal means of stopping this gnawing headache for every country whose waters have been traversed by these mostly dilapidated vessels — and yes, sinking them would be illegal. Now, these rust buckets are starting to cause an additional headache. Because they’re usually past retirement age, these vessels don’t last long before they need to be scrapped. This has opened a whole shadow trade that’s bound to cause serious harm to both humans and the environment. Earlier this month, the globally infamous Eagle S ship met its end in the Turkish port of Aliağa. The bow of the 229-meter oil tanker was on shore, its stern afloat, with cranes disassembling and moving its parts into a sealed area. The negative environmental impact of this landing method “is no doubt higher than recycling in a fully contained area,” noted the NGO Shipbreaking Platform on its website. But in the grand scheme of things, the Eagle S’s end was a relatively clean one. The 19-year-old Cook Islands-flagged oil tanker is a shadow vessel that had been transporting sanctioned Russian oil since early 2023. It then savaged an astonishing five undersea cables in the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day last year, before being detained by the Finnish authorities. People are willing to own shadow vessels because they can make a lot of money transporting sanctioned cargo. However, as the tiny, elusive outfits that own them would struggle to buy shiny new vessels even if they wanted to, these ships are often on their last legs — different surveys estimate that shadow vessels have an average age of 20 years or more. Over the last few years, Russia’s embrace of the shadow fleet for its oil export has caused the fleet to grow dramatically, as tanker owners concluded they can make good money by selling their aging ships into the fleet. (They’d make less selling the vessels to shipbreakers.) Today, the shadow fleet encompasses the vast majority of retirement-age oil tankers. But after a few years, these tankers and ships are simply too old to sail, especially since shadow vessels undergo only the most cursory maintenance. To get around safely rules, less-than-scrupulous owners often sell their nearly dead ships to “final journey” firms, which have the sole purpose of disposing of them. | Ole Berg-Rusten/EPA For aged ships, the world of official shipping has what one might call a funeral process: a scrapping market. In 2024, 409 ships were scrapped through this official market, though calling it “official” makes it sound clean and safe, which, for the most part, it isn’t. A few of the ships scrapped last year were disassembled in countries like Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, which follow strict rules regarding human and environmental safety. A handful of others were scrapped in Turkey, which has an OK record. But two-thirds were scrapped in Southeast Asia, where the shipbreaking industry is notoriously unsafe. To get around safely rules, less-than-scrupulous owners often sell their nearly dead ships to “final journey” firms, which have the sole purpose of disposing of them. These companies and their middlemen then make money by selling the ships’ considerable amount of steel to metal companies. But in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — the latter is the world’s most popular shipbreaking country — vessels are disassembled on beaches rather than sealed facilities, and by workers using little more than their hands. Of course, this makes the process cheap, but it also makes it dangerous. According to the NGO Shipbreaking Platform, last year, 15 South Asian shipbreaking workers lost their lives on the job and 45 were injured. Just one accident involving an oil tanker claimed the lives of six workers and injured another six. This brings us to the shadow fleet and its old vessels, as they, too, need to be scrapped. But many of them are under Western sanctions, which presents a challenge to their owners since international financial transactions are typically conducted in U.S. dollars. Initially, I had suspected that coastal nations would start finding all manner of shadow vessels abandoned in their waters and would be left having to arrange the scrapping. But as owners want to make money from the ships’ metal, this frightening scenario hasn’t come to pass. Instead, a shadow shipbreaking market is emerging. Open-source intelligence research shows that shadow vessel owners are now selling their sanctioned vessels to final-journey firms or middlemen in a process that mirror the official one. Given that these are mostly sanctioned vessels, the buyers naturally get a discount, which the sellers are more than willing to provide. After all, selling a larger shadow tanker for scrap value and making something to the tune of $10 to $15 million is more profitable than abandoning it. And how are the payments made? We don’t know for sure, but they’re likely in crypto or a non-U.S. dollar currency. These shady processes make the situation even more perilous for the workers doing the scrapping, not to mention for the environment. “Thanks to a string of new rules and regulations over the past five decades, shipping has become much safer, and that has reduced the number of accidents significantly in recent decades,” explained Mats Saether, a lawyer at the Nordisk legal services association in Oslo. “It’s regrettable that the shadow fleet is reversing this trend.” It certainly is. Indeed, the scrapping of shadow vessels is a practice that demands serious scrutiny. Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs could do a good deed for the environment and unfortunate shipbreaking workers by conducting investigations. And surely the Bangladeshi government wouldn’t want to see Bangladeshi lives lost because Russia needs oil for war? Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs could do a good deed for the environment and unfortunate shipbreaking workers by conducting investigations. | Ole Berg-Rusten/EPA There’s an opportunity here for Western governments to help too. They could offer shadow vessel owners legal leniency and a way to sell their ships back into the official fleet — if the owners provide the authorities with details about the fleet’s inner workings and vow to leave the business. Does that sound unlikely to succeed? Possibly. But that’s what people said about Italy’s pentiti system, and they were proven wrong. Besides, the shadow fleet is such a tumor on the shipping industry and the world’s waterways that almost any measure is worth a try.

BRUSSELS — When the colonial governments of Belgium and Portugal ordered the construction of a railway connecting oil- and mineral-rich regions in the African interior to the Atlantic, their primary objective was to plunder resources such as rubber, ivory and minerals for export to Western countries.  Today, that same stretch of railway infrastructure, snaking through Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola to the port of Lobito, is being modernized and extended with U.S. and EU money to facilitate the transport of sought-after minerals like cobalt and copper. Just this month, Jozef Síkela, the EU commissioner for international partnerships, signed a €116 million investment package for the corridor, often hailed as a model initiative under Global Gateway, the bloc’s infrastructure development program. This time around, however, Brussels says it’s committed to resetting its historically tainted relationship with the region — a message European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa will stress when they address African and EU leaders at a Nov. 24-25 summit in Luanda, Angola, which is this year celebrating 50 years of independence from Portuguese rule.  “Global Gateway is about mutual benefits,” von der Leyen said in a keynote speech in October. The program should “focus even more on key value chains,” including the metals and minerals needed in everything from smartphones to wind turbines and defense applications.  The aim, she said, is to “build up resilient value chains together. With local infrastructure, but also local jobs, local skills and local industries.”  Yet Brussels is scrambling to enter a region only to find that China got there first. Batches of copper sheets are stored in a warehouse and wait to be loaded on trucks in Zambia. | Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images African countries are already the primary suppliers of minerals to Beijing, which has secured access to their resource wealth — unhindered by any historical baggage of colonial exploitation — and is now the world’s dominant processor. Europe’s emphasis on retaining economic value in host countries — rather than merely extracting resources for export — answers calls by African leaders for a more equitable and sustainable approach to developing their countries’ natural resources.  “The EU has been quite vocal, since the beginning of the raw minerals diplomacy two years ago, saying: We want to be the ethical partner,” said Martina Matarazzo, international and EU advocacy coordinator at Resource Matters, a Belgian NGO focusing on resource extraction, which also has an office in Kinshasa, DRC.  But “there is a big gap” between what’s being said and what’s being done, she added, pointing out that it is still unclear how the Lobito Corridor can be a “win-win” project, rather than just facilitating the shipping of minerals abroad.  Brussels finds itself under growing pressure to diversify its supply chains of lithium, rare earths and other raw materials away from China — which has demonstrated time and again it is ready to weaponize its market dominance. To that end, it is drafting a new plan, due on Dec. 3, to accelerate the bloc’s diversification efforts.   In African countries, however, Brussels is still struggling to establish itself as an attractive, ethical alternative to Beijing, which has long secured vast access to the continent’s resources through large-scale investments in mining, processing and infrastructure.  To enter the minerals space, the EU needs to walk the talk in close cooperation with African leaders — doing so may be its only chance to secure resources while moving away from its extractivist past, POLITICO has found in conversations with researchers, policymakers and civil society.  RESOURCE RUSH Appetite for Africa’s vast natural riches first drew colonizers to the continent — and laid “the foundation for post-independence resource dependency and external interference,” according to the Africa Policy Research Institute. Now, the continent’s deposits of vital minerals have turned it into a strategic player, with Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema last year setting a goal of tripling copper output by the end of the decade, for instance. Beijing has often used Belt and Road, its international development initiative, to secure mining rights in exchange for infrastructure projects. Washington, which lags far behind Beijing, is also stepping up its game, with investments into Africa quietly overtaking China’s. President Donald Trump has extended the U.S. security umbrella to war-torn areas in exchange for access to resources, for example brokering a — shaky — peace deal between Rwanda and the DRC. EU companies are “really trying to catch up,” said Christian Géraud Neema Byamungu, an expert on China-Africa relations and the Francophone Africa editor of the China Global South Project. “They left Africa when there was a sense that Africa is not really a place to do business.” DOING THINGS DIFFERENTLY Against this backdrop, the key question for the EU is: What can it offer to set itself apart from other partners? On paper, the answer is clear: a responsible approach to resource extraction that prioritizes creating local economic value, along with high environmental and social standards.  “We want to focus on the sustainable development of value chains and how to work with our African partners to support their rise of the value chains,” said an EU official ahead of the Luanda summit, where minerals will be a key topic. “This is not about extraction only,” they added. But so far, that still has to translate into a concrete impact on the ground. “We are not at the point where we can see how really the EU is trying to change things on the ground in terms of value addition in DRC,” said Emmanuel Umpula Nkumba, executive director of NGO Afrewatch. “I am not naïve, they are coming to make money, not to help us,” he added.  Not only has offtake from the Lobito Corridor been slow, but the project has also come under fire for prioritizing Western interests over African development and agency, and for potentially leading to the destruction of local forests, community displacement and an overall lack of benefits for local populations.  The 2024 Lobito Corridor Trans-Africa Summit | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images The EU, however, views the corridor as “a symbol of the partnership between the African and European continent and an example of our shared investment agenda,” according to a Commission spokesperson, who called it “a lifeline towards sustainable development and shared prosperity.” Finally, while “value addition” has become a catchphrase, it’s unclear whether EU and African leaders see eye to eye on what the term means.  African industry representatives and officials often point to building a domestic supply chain up to the final product. EU officials, by contrast, tend to envision refining minerals in the country of origin and then exporting them, according to a report published by the European Council on Foreign Relations. A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS CASE? The second component of the EU’s approach — strong sustainability and human rights safeguards — faces major trouble, not least in the name of making the EU more competitive.  In Brussels, proposed rules that would require companies to police their supply chains for environmental harm and human rights violations are dying a slow death, as conservative politicians channel complaints from businesses that they can’t bear the cost of complying. An investigation by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre of the 13 mining, refining and recycling projects outside the bloc labeled “strategic” by the EU executive — including four in Africa — identified “an inconsistent approach to key human rights policies.”  However, under pressure from African leaders, stricter safeguards are slowly becoming more important in the sector: “high [environmental, social and governance] standards” are a core component of the African Union’s mining strategy published in 2024.  The Chinese, too, are adapting quickly.  “China’s also getting good with standards,” said Sarah Logan, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who co-authored the assessment of African and European interpretations of value addition. “If they are made to, Chinese mining companies are very capable of adhering to ESG standards.”  Therefore, besides massively scaling up investment, the EU and European companies will need to turn their promise of being a reliable and ethical partner into reality — sooner rather than later. “The only way to distinguish ourselves from the Chinese is to guarantee these benefits for communities,” Spanish Green European lawmaker Ana Miranda Paz told a panel discussion on the Lobito Corridor in Brussels. This story has been updated with comment from the European Commission.

LONDON — Criminal networks are “weaponizing children” to commit torture and murder by recruiting them through multiplayer video games and smartphones — and parents often have no idea what’s happening, the boss of Europe’s law enforcement agency warns.  These groups now pose the greatest single criminal threat to the European Union because they destabilize society by targeting children and destroying families, said Catherine De Bolle, executive director of Europol.  “The weaponization of children for organized crime groups is what is going on at the moment on European soil,” she said in a joint interview with POLITICO and Welt. “They weaponize the children to torture or to kill. It’s not about petty theft anymore. It’s about big crimes.”  The “worst case” Europol has seen was of a young boy who was ordered “to kill his younger sister, which happened,” she said. “It’s cruel, we have never seen this before.”  She even suggested that children and young people are being used by hostile states and hybrid threat perpetrators as unwitting spies to eavesdrop on government buildings.  The Europol chief is in a unique position to describe the criminal landscape threatening European security, as head of the EU agency responsible for intelligence coordination and supporting national police. In a wide-ranging discussion, De Bolle also cautioned that the growth of artificial intelligence is having a dramatic impact, multiplying online crime, described how drug smugglers are now using submarines to ship cocaine from South America to Europe, and described an increasing threat to European society from Russia’s hybrid war.  De Bolle’s comments come amid an ongoing debate about how to police the internet and social media to prevent young and vulnerable people from coming to harm. The greatest threat facing the EU from organized crime right now comes from groups that have “industrialized” the recruitment of children, she said: “Because [they are] the future of the European Union. If you lose them, you lose everything.” FROM GAMING TO GROOMING Criminals often begin the process of grooming children by joining their multiplayer video games, which have a chat function, and gaining their trust by discussing seemingly harmless topics like pets and family life.  Then, they will switch to a closed chat where they will move on to discussing more sinister matters, and persuade the child to share personal details like their address. At that point, the criminals can bribe or blackmail the child into committing violence, including torture, self-harm, murder and even suicide.  Europol is aware of 105 instances in which minors were involved in violent crimes “performed as a service” — including 10 contract killings. Many attempted murders fail because children are inexperienced, the agency said. “We also have children who do not execute the order and then, for instance, [the criminals] kill the pet of the child, so that the child knows very well, ‘We know where you live, we know who you are, you will obey, and if you don’t, we will go even further to kill your mother or your father,’” De Bolle warned.  Criminals will also offer children money to commit a crime — as much as $20,000 for a killing, sometimes they pay and sometimes they don’t. While these networks often target children who are vulnerable because they have psychological problems or are bullied at school, healthy and happy children are also at risk, De Bolle said. “It’s also about others, youngsters who are not vulnerable but just want new shoes — shoes that are very expensive.”  Sometimes young people are even recruited for hybrid war by state actors, she said. “You also have it with hybrid threat actors that are looking for the crime as a service model — the young perpetrators to listen to the foreign state, to listen to the communication around buildings.” Once police catch a child, the criminals abandon them and move to groom a new child to turn into a remote-operated weapon.  “Parents blame themselves in a lot of cases. They do not understand how it is possible,” she said. “The problem is you don’t have access to everything your child does and you respect also the privacy of your children. But as a parent, you need to talk about the dangers of the internet.” DRUGS AND AI ARE ALSO A PROBLEM Among the new criminal methods crossing Europol’s desks, two stand out: The use of so-called narco-submarines to smuggle drugs like cocaine from South America into the EU and the growth in AI technology fueling an explosion in online fraud that enforcement agencies are virtually powerless to stop.  Instead of shipping cocaine into the ports of Hamburg, Rotterdam and Antwerp through containers, criminals have diversified their methods, De Bolle said. One key route is to sail semi-submersible vessels from South America to Europe’s North Atlantic coast, where speedboats meet them and offload the illegal cargo via Portugal, according to Europol’s information.  While Europe now is “overflooded with drugs,” criminal organizations may make more money, more easily through online fraud, she said. “Artificial intelligence is a multiplier for crime,” she said. “Everything is done a thousand times more and faster. The abuse of artificial intelligence lies in phishing emails — you do not recognize it very easily with phishing emails anymore because the language is correct.”  She said “romance fraud” is also “booming,” as “people look for love, also online.” “With deepfakes and with voice automation systems, it’s very difficult for a law enforcement authority to recognise that from a genuine picture. The technology is not there yet to [tell] the difference,” De Bolle added.  De Bolle said Europol needed to be able to access encrypted phone messages with a judge’s authorization to disrupt these criminal networks. “When a judge decides that we need to have access to data, the online providers should be forced to give us access to this encrypted communication,” she said. Otherwise, “we will be blind and then we cannot do our job.”

By ALEX PERRY in Paris Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO This article is also available in French When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company. Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer. The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné. Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency. The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes. Advertisement “What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.” Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands. In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.” Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty. On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique. The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months. The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021. “TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity. In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.” Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” This week, the spokesperson repeated that position. Advertisement Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels. The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors.  The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre. In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught.  After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant. There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them. Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared. Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project. This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate.  Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial.  Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business. Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted. How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné? ‘POUYANNÉ PETROLEUM’ Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made. Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow. Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.” A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes. His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business. “Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023. Advertisement Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.” Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.”  Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer. The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.” The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.” In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.” ‘DON’T ASK US TO TAKE THE MORAL HIGH GROUND’ What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them. His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021. A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation.  Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast. Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West. While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks. As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient. “Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.” Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line. “Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said. ‘A COLLAPSE WILL NOT PUT TOTAL IN DANGER’ The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar. At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more. To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa. But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions.  By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion.  Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings. Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road.  A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression. Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries. “We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.” Advertisement In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.” In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.” Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces. Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency. It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one. Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added. Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. “This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said. Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.” Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss. “Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.” ‘VERY VULNERABLE’ A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security. “This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.” Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.” Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates. At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.” The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said. The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.” The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO. “Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors. Advertisement Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi. Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound.  The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed. “It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.” ‘TRAIN WRECK’ By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out. Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris. That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know. One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town. In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23. Advertisement Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return. Hours later, the Islamists attacked. “Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said. Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope. Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris. Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond.  ‘WHO CAN HELP US?!’ Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists. The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police. With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues. But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently. Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.” Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company. Advertisement A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in. It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said.  If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them. So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers. Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up. On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates. On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America. “He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’” Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved. “I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.” Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out. The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.” Advertisement TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.” The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault.  “The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.” In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.” He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.” ‘AN ALMOST PERFECT DINNER PARTY’  TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation. Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris. Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100.  Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change. Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public. Advertisement The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership.  The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct.  In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead. The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it. Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year. He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels.  Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.” So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions. “Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?” ‘FALSE ALLEGATIONS’ The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction.  The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak. U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively. Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October.  In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them. Advertisement ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny. The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company.  There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document. The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them. TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews. In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.” Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.” Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.” A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.” In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre. Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year. Advertisement That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K.  In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath.  A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest. Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.” For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life. ‘CAN YOU ACTUALLY LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR?’ The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields. In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events. The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029. The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse. Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project. A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.” Advertisement All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia. The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town. TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year. “This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week. Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure.  Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns.  Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond. A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders. At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration. In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.” Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.” Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.” At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.” Advertisement TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique. Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business. “You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?” As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests. First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?” Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?” Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.

ATHENS — The Chinese embassy in Athens lashed out against U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle on Wednesday over her recent criticism of Beijing’s investments in Greece. Guilfoyle’s comments were a “malicious slander” against Sino-Greek trade relations and a “serious interference in Greek internal affairs,” an embassy spokesperson said in a written statement. Last week Guilfoyle said China’s state ownership of the Port of Piraeus, Greece’s largest such facility, was “unfortunate” and suggested it could be circumvented. “Something could be worked out, whether you pursue a path of enhancing output in other areas or perhaps that Piraeus could be for sale,” she opined. The Chinese embassy was unimpressed. “The port of Piraeus belongs to the Greek people; it is not a tool for undermining regional prosperity and stability, and under no circumstances should it fall victim to geopolitical confrontation,” the statement read. “At a time when the port of Piraeus is undergoing rapid development, the US with self-serving intentions, is encouraging Greece to terminate its contractual obligations and sell the port — this practice is a typical example of imposing its own thinking on others and reveals a mindset that attempts to undermine stability.” China invested heavily in debt-ridden Greece during the country’s lengthy economic crisis, a decade-long saga that started in 2009, with the goal of making it a hub for Chinese exports. At the time, companies from other Western countries were turning away from Athens, spooked by its financial woes and infamous bureaucracy. Cosco, China’s state-owned shipping company, secured a majority stake in the Port of Piraeus in 2016. Beijing intended that Piraeus become a key part — the so-called dragon’s head — of its Belt and Road global infrastructure project. “The port of Piraeus was handed over to the Chinese during the financial crisis in Greece, as they were the only ones who submitted a bid,” Greek Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lana Zochiou said during a Tuesday briefing in Athens. “Greece respects the agreements that have been conducted in the past.” Guilfoyle, a one-time conservative pundit on U.S.-based network Fox News, suggested Beijing’s current influence might be offset by increasing American investment in other infrastructure projects. Indeed, Athens is accelerating plans to develop a new port in Elefsina, a U.S.-backed project that officials say could serve as a counterweight to China’s presence in Piraeus. The idea was discussed on Tuesday at a meeting between Guilfoyle and Greek Development Minister Takis Theodorikakos, after which Athens moved to implement the plan. “We look forward to seeing Elefsina Port evolve into a logistics hub for the region,” Guilfoyle said after the meeting.

ATHENS — Athens and Kyiv signed an agreement on Sunday for Ukraine to import liquified natural gas to help meet the country’s winter energy needs, as Greece becomes the first EU country to actively participate in the U.S. plan to replace “every last molecule of Russian gas” with American LNG. The plan calls for U.S. LNG deliveries routed through Greece from next month to March 2026 via the vertical gas corridor, a newly activated pipeline system for natural gas that includes pipelines, LNG terminals and storage facilities. The project — actively lobbied by the U.S. — is intended to provide energy to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, with Greece being the entry point for U.S. gas going up to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and farther north to Ukraine and Moldova. “Ukraine gains direct access to diversified and reliable energy sources, while Greece becomes a hub for supplying Central and Eastern Europe with American liquefied natural gas,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, emphasizing Greece’s growing role as an energy hub. The agreement will “cover nearly €2 billion needed for gas imports to compensate for the losses in Ukrainian production caused by Russian strikes,” Zelenskyy said in a statement Sunday. The deal was signed during a visit by Zelenskyy to Athens, attended by Mitsotakis, Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou and U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle. The agreement signed on Sunday formalized a declaration of intent between Greece’s gas company DEPA Commercial and Ukraine’s Naftogaz. Greece aims to showcase its importance as an entry point for American LNG, bolstering Europe’s independence from Russian gas. Athens last week signed a 20-year deal to import 700 million cubic meters of U.S. LNG a year starting in 2030, aiming to boost U.S. LNG shipments from Greece to its northern European neighbors. “What we see for the future of Greece and the United States is Greece being an energy hub and showing this energy dominance that both of our countries can experience and work together cooperatively to achieve tremendous outcomes,” Ambassador Guilfoyle said in an interview with Antenna TV on Thursday. The deal was signed during a visit by Zelenskyy to Athens, attended by Mitsotakis, Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou and U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle. | Clive Brunskill/Getty Images “Cooperation within the framework of the ‘vertical corridor’ may prove to be more decisive for peace and prosperity in the region than NATO,” Energy Minister Papastavrou told a conference in Athens on Tuesday. In addition to the U.S. LNG deal, Greece has opened its waters to gas exploration for the first time in more than four decades, with American help, under an agreement signed with ExxonMobil, the U.S.’s biggest oil company, along with Greece’s Energean and HelleniQ Energy. “This is understood and portrayed to be significantly adding to Greece’s value added as a commercial partner and geopolitical ally,” said Harry Tzimitras, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo Cyprus Centre. But he also noted criticisms of Greece’s energy push, including environmental consequences, financial challenges and geopolitical risks. “These span the whole gamut of the project’s aspects: Greece would have to double its storage capacity … requiring extensive construction of depots and LNG facilities with serious potential environmental footprint,” Tzimitras said. “U.S. LNG is currently very expensive, straining energy budgets; the likelihood of  geopolitical antagonisms is heightened; and the whole project is identified as going against the efforts to achieve environmental targets, contributing to the delay in transitioning to renewable energy sources,” he said.

Businesses from Wall Street to main street are struggling to comply with President Donald Trump’s byzantine tariff regime, driving up costs and counteracting, for some, the benefits of the corporate tax cuts Republicans passed earlier this year. Trump has ripped up the U.S. tariff code over the past year, replacing a decades-old system that imposed the same tariffs on imports from all but a few countries with a vastly more complicated system of many different tariff rates depending on the origin of imported goods. To give an example, an industrial product that faced a mostly uniform 5 percent tariff rate in the past could now be taxed at 15 percent if it comes from the EU or Japan, 20 percent from Norway and many African countries, 24 to 25 percent from countries in Southeast Asia and upwards of 50 percent from India, Brazil or China. “This has been an exhausting year, I’d say, for most CEOs in the country,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO and vice chair of the Consumer Technology Association, an industry group whose 1,300 member companies include major brands like Amazon, Walmart and AMD, as well as many small businesses and startups. “The level of executive time that’s been put in this has been enormous. So instead of focusing on innovation, they’re focusing on how they deal with the tariffs.” Upping the pressure, the Justice Department has announced that it intends to make the prosecution of customs fraud one of its top priorities. The proliferation of trade regulations and threat of intensified enforcement has driven many companies to beef up their staff and spend what could add up to tens of millions of dollars to ensure they are not running afoul of Trump’s requirements. The time and expense involved, combined with the tens of billions of dollars in higher tariffs that companies are paying each month to import goods, amount to a massive burden that is weighing down industries traditionally reliant on imported products. And it’s denting, for some, the impact of the hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts that companies will receive over the next decade via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act championed by the White House. “Every CEO survey says this is their biggest issue,” said Shapiro. A recent survey by KPMG, a professional services firm, found 89 percent of CEOs said they expect tariffs to significantly impact their business’ performance and operations over the next three years, with 86 percent saying they expect to respond by increasing prices for their goods and services as needed. Maytee Pereira, managing director for customs and international trade at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, another professional services firm, has seen a similar trend. “Many of our clients have been spending easily 30 to 60 percent of their time having tariff conversations across the organization,” Pereira said. That’s forced CEOs to get involved in import-sourcing decisions to an unprecedented degree and intensified competition for personnel trained in customs matters. “There’s a real dearth of trade professionals,” Pereira said. “There isn’t a day that I don’t speak to a client who has lost people from their trade teams, because there is this renewed need for individuals with those resources, with those skill sets.” But the impact goes far beyond a strain on personnel into reducing the amount of money that companies are willing to spend on purchasing new capital equipment or making other investments to boost their long-term growth. “People are saying they can’t put money into R&D,” said one industry official, who was granted anonymity because of the risk of antagonizing the Trump administration. “They can’t put money into siting new factories in the United States. They don’t have the certainty they need to make decisions.” A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. However, the administration has previously defended tariffs as key to boosting domestic manufacturing, along with their overall economic agenda of tax cuts and reduced regulation. They’ve also touted commitments from companies and other countries for massive new investments in the U.S. in order to avoid tariffs, although they’ve acknowledged it will take time for the benefits to reach workers and consumers. “Look, I would have loved to be able to snap my fingers, have these facilities going. It takes time,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview this week on Fox News. “I think 2026 is going to be a blockbuster year.” For some companies, however, any benefit they’ve received from Trump’s push to lower taxes and reduce regulations has been substantially eroded by the new burden of complying with his complicated tariff system, said a second industry official, who was also granted anonymity for the same reason. “It is incredibly complex,” that second industry official said. “And it keeps changing, too.” Matthew Aleshire, director of the Milken Institute’s Geo-Economics Initiative, said he did not know of any studies yet that estimate the overall cost, both in time and money, for American businesses to comply with Trump’s new trade regulations. But it appears substantial. “I think for some firms and investors, it may be on par with the challenges experienced in the early days of Covid. For others, maybe a little less so. And for others, it may be even more complex. But it’s absolutely eating up or taking a lot of time and bandwidth,” Aleshire said. The nonpartisan think tank’s new report, “Unintended Consequences: Trade and Supply Chain Leaders Respond to Recent Turmoil,” is the first in a new series exploring how companies are navigating the evolving trade landscape, he said. One of the main findings is that it has become very difficult for companies to make decisions, “given the high degree of uncertainty” around tariff policy, Aleshire said. Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs — imposed on most countries under a 1977 emergency powers act that is now being challenged in court — start at a baseline level of 10 percent that applies to roughly 100 trading partners. He’s set higher rates, ranging from 15 to 41 percent, on nearly 100 others, including the 27-member European Union. Those duties stack on top of the longstanding U.S. “most-favored nation” tariffs. Two notable exceptions are the EU and Japan, which received special treatment in their deals with Trump. Companies also could get hit with a 40 percent penalty tariff if the Trump administration determines an item from a high-tariffed country has been illegally shipped through a third country — or assembled there — to obtain a lower tariff rate. However, businesses are still waiting for more details on how that so-called transshipment provision, which the Trump administration outlined in a summer executive order, will work. The president also has hit China, Canada and Mexico with a separate set of tariffs under the 1977 emergency law to pressure those countries to do more to stop shipments of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from entering the United States. Imports from Canada and Mexico are exempt from the fentanyl duties, however, if they comply with the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a trade pact Trump brokered in his first term. That has spared most goods the U.S. imports from its North American neighbors, but also has forced many more companies to spend time filling out paperwork to document their compliance. Trump’s increasingly baroque tariff regime also includes the “national security” duties he has imposed on steel, aluminum, autos, auto parts, copper, lumber, furniture and heavy trucks under a separate trade law. But the administration has provided a partial exemption for the 25 percent tariffs he has imposed on autos and auto parts, and has struck deals with the EU, Japan and South Korea reducing the tariff on their autos to 15 percent. In contrast, Trump has taken a hard line against exemptions from his 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, and recently expanded the duties to cover more than 400 “derivative” products, such as chemicals, plastics and furniture, that contain some amount of steel and aluminum or are shipped in steel and aluminum containers. And the administration is not stopping there, putting out a request in September for further items it can add to the steel and aluminum tariffs. “This is requiring companies that do not even produce steel and aluminum products to keep track of and report what might be in the products that they’re importing, and it’s just gotten incredibly complicated,” one of the industry officials granted anonymity said. That’s because companies need to precisely document the amount of steel or aluminum used in a product to qualify for a tariff rate below 50 percent. “Any wrong step, like any incorrect information, or even delay in providing the information, risks the 50 percent tariff value on the entire product, not just on the metal. So the consequence is really high if you don’t get it right,” the industry official said. The administration has also signaled plans to similarly expand tariffs for other products, such as copper. And the still unknown outcomes of ongoing trade investigations that could lead to additional tariffs on pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, polysilicon, unmanned aircraft systems, wind turbines, medical products and robotics and industrial machinery continue to make it difficult for many companies to plan for the future. Small business owners say they feel particularly overwhelmed trying to keep up with all the various tariff rules and rates. “We are no longer investing into product innovation, we’re not investing into new hires, we’re not investing into growth. We’re just spending our money trying to stay afloat through this,” said Cassie Abel, founder and CEO of Wild Rye, an Idaho company which sells outdoor clothing for women, during a virtual press conference with a coalition of other small business owners critical of the tariffs. Company employees have also “spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours counter-sourcing product, pausing production, restarting production, rushing production, running price analysis, cost analysis, shipping analysis,” Abel said. “I spent zero minutes on tariffs before this administration.” In one sign of the duress small businesses are facing, they have led the charge in the Supreme Court case challenging Trump’s use of the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose both the reciprocal and the fentanyl-related tariffs. Crutchfield Corp., a family-owned electronics retailer based in Charlottesville, Virginia, filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting the litigants in the case, in which the owners detailed its difficulties in coping with Trump’s erratic tariff actions. “If tariffs can be imposed, increased, decreased, suspended or altered … through the changing whim of a single person, then Crutchfield cannot plan for the short term, let alone the long run,” the company wrote in its brief, asking “the Court to quell the chaos.”

ATHENS — The Trump administration has a new European target in its crosshairs: China’s state ownership of Piraeus port in Greece. “It is unfortunate, but I think there’s ways around it, that something could be worked out, whether you pursue a path of enhancing output in other areas or perhaps that Piraeus could be for sale,” the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said in an interview with local outlet Antenna TV. China invested heavily in debt-ridden Greece during the country’s lengthy economic crisis, with the goal of making it a hub for Chinese exports. Athens actively courted Beijing as companies from other Western countries turned away from Greece, spooked by its financial woes and infamous bureaucracy. Cosco, China’s state-owned shipping company, secured a majority stake in Greece’s largest port of Piraeus in 2016, making it a key part — the so-called dragon’s head — of its global infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Guilfoyle, a former TV host on US broadcaster Fox, suggested that Beijing’s current influence could potentially be balanced by increased American investment in other infrastructure projects. “I think it’s very important to have American infrastructure here to help support the region. To perhaps, in fact, enhance output from other ports and areas to balance against the Chinese influence with the port of Piraeus,” she said. Greece sold Piraeus port under pressure from the country’s European creditors, and Cosco was the only company to submit an offer. Guilfoyle added that Washington sees Greece as a rising energy hub crucial to securing energy independence “to push back against Russian and Chinese interests.”

BELÉM, Brazil — Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) will arrive Friday at the COP30 climate summit — making him the sole U.S. federal representative at United Nations talks that the Trump administration is skipping. Whitehouse’s office said he will meet in the Amazonian port city of Belém, Brazil, with elected officials along with business and global climate leaders. It said his goal is to show that the U.S. public still broadly supports addressing climate change despite Trump abstaining from the negotiations. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered a similar message earlier this week during his own swing through Belém. The White House has defended the U.S. absence from the talks, maintaining that the annual global climate gatherings work in the interests of rival countries like China. “President Trump will not allow the best interest of the American people to be jeopardized by the Green Energy Scam,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in an email last week. One GOP lawmaker, Sen. John Curtis of Utah, had planned to attend the summit but canceled because of the federal government shutdown. Whitehouse said he plans to harp on Trump and GOP policies that he cast as unpopular and responsible for boosting energy costs. “Amidst sinking approvals and a shellacking in the most recent elections, it’s no surprise the Trump administration is unwilling to defend the fossil fuel industry’s unpopular and corrupt climate denial lies on the global stage.” Whitehouse will participate in events Friday on offshore wind, shipping and non-carbon-dioxide greenhouse gas emissions before delivering a keynote speech at a roundtable with elected officials from other nations hosted by the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. On Saturday, he will weigh in on methane rules, net-zero policies and the effect climate change has on oceans.

China suspended a ban on exporting some dual-use materials to the U.S., the Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced on Sunday, following the easing of trade tensions between the two sides. The move covers exports of gallium, germanium and antimony, which are used in the production of advanced semiconductors used in smartphones and computing. The materials are also used in military technologies such as electronic warfare and surveillance systems, and, in the case of antimony, also missile systems and ammunition. Beijing suspended a measure introduced last year that restricted exports of those materials and imposed stricter checks on dual-use items that include graphite. The suspension will be in effect “from now until Nov. 27, 2026,” the ministry said in a statement. China’s President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump recently agree to lower tariffs and ease other trade measures for one year, providing relief to global value chains after a trade war that threatened to escalate. Beijing has relaxed checks on exports of rare earths and lithium battery materials and agreed to resume shipping key chips for Europe’s manufacturers.