A fair, fast and competitive transition begins with what already works and then rapidly scales it up.  Across the EU commercial road transport sector, the diversity of operations is met with a diversity of solutions. Urban taxis are switching to electric en masse. Many regional coaches run on advanced biofuels, with electrification emerging in smaller applications such as school services, as European e-coach technologies are still maturing and only now beginning to enter the market. Trucks electrify rapidly where operationally and financially possible, while others, including long-haul and other hard-to-electrify segments, operate at scale on HVO (hydrotreated vegetable oil) or biomethane, cutting emissions immediately and reliably. These are real choices made every day by operators facing different missions, distances, terrains and energy realities, showing that decarbonization is not a single pathway but a spectrum of viable ones.  Building on this diversity, many operators are already modernizing their fleets and cutting emissions through electrification. When they can control charging, routing and energy supply, electric vehicles often deliver a positive total cost of ownership (TCO), strong reliability and operational benefits. These early adopters prove that electrification works where the enabling conditions are in place, and that its potential can expand dramatically with the right support. > Decarbonization is not a single pathway but a spectrum of viable ones chosen > daily by operators facing real-world conditions. But scaling electrification faces structural bottlenecks. Grid capacity is constrained across the EU, and upgrades routinely take years. As most heavy-duty vehicle charging will occur at depots, operators cannot simply move around to look for grid opportunities. They are bound to the location of their facilities.  The recently published grid package tries, albeit timidly, to address some of these challenges, but it neither resolves the core capacity deficiencies nor fixes the fundamental conditions that determine a positive TCO: the predictability of electricity prices, the stability of delivered power, and the resulting charging time. A truck expected to recharge in one hour at a high-power station may wait far longer if available grid power drops. Without reliable timelines, predictable costs and sufficient depot capacity, most transport operators cannot make long-term investment decisions. And the grid is only part of the enabling conditions needed: depot charging infrastructure itself requires significant additional investment, on top of vehicles that already cost several hundreds of thousands of euros more than their diesel equivalents.  This is why the EU needs two things at once: strong enablers for electrification and hydrogen; and predictability on what the EU actually recognizes as clean. Operators using renewable fuels, from biomethane to advanced biofuels and HVO, delivering up to 90 percent CO2 reduction, are cutting emissions today. Yet current CO2 frameworks, for both light-duty vehicles and heavy-duty trucks, fail to recognize fleets running on these fuels as part of the EU’s decarbonization solution for road transport, even when they deliver immediate, measurable climate benefits. This lack of clarity limits investment and slows additional emission reductions that could happen today. > Policies that punish before enabling will not accelerate the transition; a > successful shift must empower operators, not constrain them. The revision of both CO2 standards, for cars and vans, and for heavy-duty vehicles, will therefore be pivotal. They must support electrification and hydrogen where they fit the mission, while also recognizing the contribution of renewable and low-carbon fuels across the fleet. Regulations that exclude proven clean options will not accelerate the transition. They will restrict it.  With this in mind, the question is: why would the EU consider imposing purchasing mandates on operators or excessively high emission-reduction targets on member states that would, in practice, force quotas on buyers? Such measures would punish before enabling, removing choice from those who know their operations best. A successful transition must empower operators, not constrain them.  The EU’s transport sector is committed and already delivering. With the right enablers, a technology-neutral framework, and clarity on what counts as clean, the EU can turn today’s early successes into a scalable, fair and competitive decarbonization pathway.  We now look with great interest to the upcoming Automotive Package, hoping to see pragmatic solutions to these pressing questions, solutions that EU transport operators, as the buyers and daily users of all these technologies, are keenly expecting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Disclaimer POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT * The sponsor is IRU – International Road Transport Union  * The ultimate controlling entity is IRU – International Road Transport Union  More information here.

BRUSSELS — Cheap packages entering the EU will be charged a tax of €3 per item from next July, the bloc’s 27 finance ministers agreed on Friday. The deal effectively ends the tax-free status for packages worth less than €150. The flat tax will apply for each different type of item in a package. If one package contains 10 plushy toys, the duty is applied once. But if the shipment also contains a charging cable, another €3 is added. The flood of untaxed and often unsafe goods prompted the European Commission to propose a temporary solution for the packages under €150 a month ago. This “de minimis” rule allows exporters like Shein and Temu to send products directly to consumers, often bypassing scrutiny. The EU has already received more packages in the first nine months of 2025 than in the entire previous year, when the counter hit 4.6 billion. French Finance Minister Roland Lescure called it “a literal invasion of parcels in Europe last year,” which would have hit “7, 8, 9 billion in the coming years if nothing was done.” An EU official told POLITICO earlier this month that at some airports, up to 80 percent of such packages arriving don’t comply with EU safety rules. This creates a huge workload for customs officials, a growing pile of garbage, and health risks from unsafe toys and kitchen items. EU countries have already agreed to formally abolish the de-minimis loophole, but taxing all items based on their actual value and product type will require more data exchange. That will only be possible once an ambitious reform of the bloc’s Customs Union, currently under negotiation, is completed by 2028. The €3 flat tax is the temporary solution to cover the period until then. The rising popularity of web shops like Shein and Temu, which both operate out of China is fueling this flood. France suspended access to Shein’s online platform this month. This €3 EU-wide tax will be distinct from the so-called handling fee that France has proposed as a part of its national budget to relieve the costs on customs for dealing with the same flood of packages. Klara Durand and Camille Gijs contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — Russian state assets in Europe could remain permanently frozen under a legal mechanism approved by EU capitals on Thursday. The EU’s ambassadors handed emergency powers to the European Commission to keep €210 billion in Russian state assets blocked until the Kremlin pays post-war reparations to Ukraine, the Danish Council presidency announced on Thursday. It said that ambassadors had “agreed on a revised version of the Art. 122-proposal and approved the launch of a written procedure for formal Council decision by tomorrow around 5 pm.” The decision was taken by a “very clear majority.” The legal mechanism deals a major blow to the Kremlin’s hopes of unfreezing its money as part of a post-war peace settlement — an idea that has been championed by U.S. President Donald Trump but remains unpopular in Europe. The EU’s new emergency powers will remain in place until “Russia ceases its war of aggression against Ukraine, and provides reparations to Ukraine,” according to a legal text, seen by POLITICO, that was backed by the EU’s 27 ambassadors on Thursday afternoon. In a major boost to Ukraine, the legal workaround significantly reduces the chance that pro-Kremlin countries in Europe, such as Hungary and Slovakia, will hand back the frozen funds to Russia. The emergency clause effectively overhauls the current rules, which compel EU countries to unanimously reauthorize the sanctions every six months.  Kremlin-friendly countries are thereby set to lose their power to release the sanctioned money simply by voting “no” on sanctions renewal. Were that to happen after the EU provided an assets-backed loan to Kyiv, the EU’s 27 capitals would be on the hook to repay the loan to Russia. The EU justified the seismic legal change on the grounds that handing back the assets to Russia would wreak havoc on the EU economy — and potentially fuel hybrid attacks by the Kremlin across the bloc. Keeping the assets frozen “is a measure that is appropriate in order to avoid further repercussions of unprecedented magnitude on the economic situation of the Union caused by Russia’s actions,” the Commission wrote in the legal text. The EU executive initially proposed the legal mechanism to strengthen a separate plan to mobilize €210 billion in frozen Russian assets for Ukraine — most of which are held by the Belgian-based Euroclear.  Belgium, however, is opposed to the plan over fears that it will be on the hook to repay the loan if Russia claws back the money. In order to allay Belgium’s concerns, the Commission stripped references to the loan from the legal proposal that was approved Thursday. Giovanna Faggionato contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — The EU will begin to ban all Russian gas imports to the bloc early next year after lawmakers, officials and diplomatic negotiators struck a last-minute deal over a key piece of legislation set to reshape Europe’s energy sector. Put forward over the summer, the bill is designed to kill off the EU’s lingering Russian energy dependency at a critical juncture in the Ukraine war, with Russia advancing steadily and Kyiv fast running out of cash. While Europe’s imports of Russian gas have fallen sharply since 2022, the country still accounts for around 19 percent of its total intake. The EU is already set to sanction Russian gas imports, but those measures are temporary and subject to renewal every six months. The new legislation is designed to make that rupture permanent and put member countries that still operate contracts with Russia on a surer footing in the event of legal action. “We were paying to Russia €12 billion per month at the beginning of the war for fossil fuels. Now we’re down to €1.5 billion per month … We aim to bring it down to zero,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters on Wednesday. “This is a good day for Europe and for our independence from Russian fossil fuels — this is how we make Europe resilient.” “We wanted to show that Europe will never go back to Russian fossil fuels again — and the only ones who lost today are Russia and Mr Putin,” Green MEP Ville Niinistö, one of the Parliament’s two lead negotiators on the file, told POLITICO. The law will enter into force on Jan. 1 next year and then apply to different kinds of gas in phases. Spot market purchases of gas will be banned almost immediately, while existing short- and long-term contracts will be banned in 2026 and 2027. A prohibition on pipeline gas will come into effect in September 2027, owing to concerns from landlocked countries reliant on Russian gas, such as Slovakia and Hungary. Finalized in barely six months, the law was the subject of fierce disagreements in recent weeks as the European Parliament’s more ambitious stance irked member countries concerned about the legal risks and technical difficulties of the ban. But despite fears that talks would be prolonged and even spill over into the new year, negotiators reached a compromise on key aspects of the law at the last minute. Now both sides can claim victory. Lawmakers, for instance, repeatedly pushed for an earlier timeline and ultimately ensured that none of the bans would enter into force later than 2027. The Parliament also secured commitments from national capitals to impose one of three penalties on companies that breach the rule: a lump sum penalty of €40 million, 3.5 percent of a company’s annual turnover, or 300 percent of the value of the offending transaction. Where the Council included its demands, the Parliament was able to water them down. For instance, lawmakers convinced member countries to tighten a controversial clause allowing countries facing energy crises to lift the ban — suspensions will only last four weeks at a time and will need to be reviewed by Parliament and the Commission. The Parliament also backed down from a push for a parallel ban on Russian crude imports in the same file after the Commission promised a separate bill early next year, as first reported by POLITICO. The Council did push through its controversial list of “safe” countries from which the EU can still import gas without rigorous vetting. Lawmakers complained that the list includes Qatar, Algeria and Nigeria, but have now accepted it, so long as countries can be excised from the list if they offend. MEPs gushed that they got far more than they expected and weren’t trampled by seasoned diplomats, as some had feared. “We have strengthened the European Commission’s initial proposal by introducing a pathway towards a ban on oil and its products, ending long-term contracts sooner than originally proposed, and secured harmonized EU penalties for non-compliance,” European People’s Party MEP Inese Vaidere, who also led the file, told POLITICO. “We achieved more than my realistic landing scenario — earlier phase-outs, tougher penalties, and closing the loopholes that let Russian gas sneak in,” said Niinistö. “This was about proving European unity — Parliament, Council and Commission on the same side — and showing citizens that we can cut Russia’s revenues faster and more decisively than ever proposed before.”

BRUSSELS — The military should get involved in the green transition to ensure that Russia doesn’t exploit new vulnerabilities brought about by the move to renewable energy sources, a top EU body said in a document obtained by POLITICO. The bloc has made efforts in recent years to end dependence on Russian fuels and move toward cleaner technology, and is set to ban Russian gas imports entirely under its broader REPowerEU roadmap. However, a letter drafted by the Danish presidency of the Council of the EU and sent on Nov. 28 to EU ambassadors argued that the transition also introduces “new layers of complexity” as Europe’s old energy architecture — including petrol stations, pipelines, refineries and other infrastructure — is phased out. That complicates supply chains on which militaries depend, requiring “enhanced energy independence and engagement in the green transition” by the transatlantic military alliance NATO. The letter, first reported on by Contexte, also calls for stronger coordination between NATO and the EU on energy policy. In particular, officials ought to look at how to protect Europe’s energy infrastructure amid an increase in “physical sabotage and cyberattacks targeting pipelines, cables, ports, and power grids,” it said. The digitization of many energy sources, it added, also requires “strong security measures throughout all phases of infrastructure planning, design, and operation.” The initiative will be discussed by energy ministers on Dec. 15.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission has unveiled a new plan to end the dominance of planet-heating fossil fuels in Europe’s economy — and replace them with trees. The so-called Bioeconomy Strategy, released Thursday, aims to replace fossil fuels in products like plastics, building materials, chemicals and fibers with organic materials that regrow, such as trees and crops. “The bioeconomy holds enormous opportunities for our society, economy and industry, for our farmers and foresters and small businesses and for our ecosystem,” EU environment chief Jessika Roswall said on Thursday, in front of a staged backdrop of bio-based products, including a bathtub made of wood composite and clothing from the H&M “Conscious” range. At the center of the strategy is carbon, the fundamental building block of a wide range of manufactured products, not just energy. Almost all plastic, for example, is made from carbon, and currently most of that carbon comes from oil and natural gas. But fossil fuels have two major drawbacks: they pollute the atmosphere with planet-warming CO2, and they are mostly imported from outside the EU, compromising the bloc’s strategic autonomy. The bioeconomy strategy aims to address both drawbacks by using locally produced or recycled carbon-rich biomass rather than imported fossil fuels. It proposes doing this by setting targets in relevant legislation, such as the EU’s packaging waste laws, helping bioeconomy startups access finance, harmonizing the regulatory regime and encouraging new biomass supply. The 23-page strategy is light on legislative or funding promises, mostly piggybacking on existing laws and funds. Still, it was hailed by industries that stand to gain from a bigger market for biological materials. “The forest industry welcomes the Commission’s growth-oriented approach for bioeconomy,” said Viveka Beckeman, director general of the Swedish Forest Industries Federation, stressing the need to “boost the use of biomass as a strategic resource that benefits not only green transition and our joint climate goals but the overall economic security.” HOW RENEWABLE IS IT? But environmentalists worry Brussels may be getting too chainsaw-happy. Trees don’t grow back at the drop of a hat and pressure on natural ecosystems is already unsustainably high. Scientific reports show that the amount of carbon stored in the EU’s forests and soils is decreasing, the bloc’s natural habitats are in poor condition and biodiversity is being lost at unprecedented rates. Protecting the bloc’s forests has also fallen out of fashion among EU lawmakers. The EU’s landmark anti-deforestation law is currently facing a second, year-long delay after a vote in the European Parliament this week. In October, the Parliament also voted to scrap a law to monitor the health of Europe’s forests to reduce paperwork. Environmentalists warn the bloc may simply not have enough biomass to meet the increasing demand. “Instead of setting a strategy that confronts Europe’s excessive demand for resources, the Commission clings to the illusion that we can simply replace our current consumption with bio-based inputs, overlooking the serious and immediate harm this will inflict on people and nature,” said Eva Bille, the European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) circular economy head, in a statement. TOO WOOD TO BE TRUE Environmental groups want the Commission to prioritize the use of its biological resources in long-lasting products — like construction — rather than lower-value or short-lived uses, like single-use packaging or fuel. A first leak of the proposal, obtained by POLITICO, gave environmental groups hope. It celebrated new opportunities for sustainable bio-based materials while also warning that the “sources of primary biomass must be sustainable and the pressure on ecosystems must be considerably reduced” — to ensure those opportunities are taken up in the longer term. It also said the Commission would work on “disincentivising inefficient biomass combustion” and substituting it with other types of renewable energy. That rankled industry lobbies. Craig Winneker, communications director of ethanol lobby ePURE, complained that the document’s language “continues an unfortunate tradition in some quarters of the Commission of completely ignoring how sustainable biofuels are produced in Europe,” arguing that the energy is “actually a co-product along with food, feed, and biogenic CO2.” Now, those lines pledging to reduce environmental pressures and to disincentivize inefficient biomass combustion are gone. “Bioenergy continues to play a role in energy security, particularly where it uses residues, does not increase water and air pollution, and complements other renewables,” the final text reads. “This is a crucial omission, given that the EU’s unsustainable production and consumption are already massively overshooting ecological boundaries and putting people, nature and businesses at risk,” said the EEB. Delara Burkhardt, a member of the European Parliament with the center-left Socialists and Democrats, said it was “good that the strategy recognizes the need to source biomass sustainably,” but added the proposal did not address sufficiency. “Simply replacing fossil materials with bio-based ones at today’s levels of consumption risks increasing pressure on ecosystems. That shifts problems rather than solving them. We need to reduce overall resource use, not just switch inputs,” she said. Roswall declined to comment on the previous draft at Thursday’s press conference. “I think that we need to increase the resources that we have, and that is what this strategy is trying to do,” she said.

LONDON — Ministers must act now to address an “emerging risk to gas supply security,” the government’s official independent energy advisers have warned.  The government must make plans to avert a threat to future gas supplies, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) said.  While the advisers say the conditions creating a gas supply crisis are unlikely, any shortage would have a severe impact on the country. In its first annual assessment of Britain’s gas security, expected to be released later today but seen by POLITICO, the NESO said diminishing reserves of gas in the North Sea and competition for imports are creating new energy security risks, even as the country’s decarbonization push reduces overall demand for the fossil fuel.  Britain is projected to have sufficient gas supplies for normal weather scenarios by winter 2030/31, but in the event of severe cold weather and an outage affecting key infrastructure, supply would fall well short of demand, NESO projects.   The scenario in the report involves what the NESO calls the “unlikely event” of a one-in-20-year cold spell lasting 11 days alongside the loss of vital infrastructure.   If this were to occur, the consequences of a shortfall in gas supply could be dire.   It could trigger emergency measures including cutting off gas from factories, power stations, and — in extreme scenarios — homes as well. It could take weeks or months to return the country to normal.   The vast majority of homes still use gas boilers for heating.   VULNERABILITY Informed by the NESO’s findings, ministers have published a consultation setting out a range of options for shoring up gas security.  It comes amid growing concern in Whitehall about the U.K.’s vulnerability to gas supply disruptions. Russia is actively mapping key offshore infrastructure like gas pipelines and ministers have warned it has the capability to “damage or destroy infrastructure in deepwater,” in the event that tensions over Ukraine spill over into a wider European conflict.  While Britain has long enjoyed a secure flow of domestically-produced gas from the North Sea — which still supplies more than a third of the fuel — NESO’s report says gas fields are experiencing “rapid decline.” The amount available to meet demand in Britain falls to “12 to 13 percent winter-on-winter until 2035,” it says.  That will leave the U.K. ever more dependent on imports, via pipeline from Norway and increasingly via ship-borne liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. — and Britain will be competing with other countries for the supply of both.  The report projects that during peak demand periods in the 2030s, the Britain’s import dependency will be as high as 90 percent or more.  Overall, gas demand will be lower in the 2030s because of the shift to renewable electricity and electric heating, but demand will remain relatively high on very cold days, and when there is little wind to power offshore turbines, requiring gas power stations to be deployed, the report says.  “This presents emerging risks that we will need to understand to ensure reliable supplies are maintained for consumers,” it adds.  Reducing demand for gas by decarbonizing will be key, the report says, and risks are higher in scenarios where the country slows down its shift away from gas.   But decarbonization alone will not be enough to ensure the U.K. would meet the so-called “N-1 test” — a sufficient supply of gas even if the “single largest piece” of gas infrastructure fails — during a prolonged cold spell in winter 2030/31. In that scenario, “peak day demand” is projected to reach 461 million cubic meters (mcm), but supply would fall to 385 mcm, resulting in a supply deficit of 76 mcm, a shortfall of around 16 percent of what is needed to power the country on that day.  That means ministers should start considering alternative options now, including the construction of new infrastructure like storage facilities, liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminals, or new onshore pipelines to ensure more gas can get from LNG import sites to the rest of the country. The government consultation will look at these and other options.   The critical piece of gas infrastructure considered under the N-1 test is not identified for security reasons, but is likely to be a major import pipeline from Norway or an LNG terminal. The report says that even “smaller losses … elsewhere in the gas supply system” could threaten gas security in extreme cold weather.  GAS SECURITY ‘PARAMOUNT’  The findings will likely be seized on by the oil and gas industry to argue for a more liberal licensing and tax regime in the North Sea, on a day when the government announced its backing for more fossil fuel production in areas already licensed for exploration.  But such measures are unlikely to be a silver bullet. The report says: “Exploration of new fields is unlikely to deliver material new capacity within the required period.”  Deborah Petterson, NESO’s director of resilience and emergency management, said that gas supply would be “sufficient to meet demand under normal weather conditions.”  “We have, however, identified an emerging risk to gas supply security where decarbonization is slowest or in the unlikely event of the loss of the single largest piece of gas infrastructure on the system.  “By conducting this analysis, we are able to identify emerging risks early and, crucially, in time for mitigations to be put in place,” she added.  A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said ministers were “working with industry to ensure the gas system is fit for the future, including maintaining security of supply — which is paramount.”   “Gas will continue to play a key role in our energy system as we transition to clean, more secure, homegrown energy,” they added. “This report sets out clearly that decarbonization is the best route to energy security — helping us reduce demand for gas while getting us off the rollercoaster of volatile fossil fuel markets.”  Glenn Bryn-Jacobsen, director of energy resilience and systems at gas network operator National Gas Transmission, said in the short-term, Britain’s gas supply outlook was “robust” but that “looking ahead, we recognise the potential longer-term challenges.” “Gas remains a critical component of Britain’s energy security — keeping homes warm, powering industry, and supporting electricity generation during periods of peak demand and low renewable output,” he added. “In considering potential solutions, it is essential to look at both the gas supply landscape and the investment required in network infrastructure,” he said. 

BELÉM, Brazil — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Friday that the fight against climate change was not against the fuels that cause it — only the pollution they emit. “We are not fighting fossil fuels, we are fighting the emissions from fossil fuels,” said von der Leyen at a press conference at the G20 in South Africa. The comment could undermine the EU position, just as European ministers were set to make a stand for a “roadmap” to move away from coal, oil and gas at the COP30 climate talks, taking place on the other side of the Atlantic in Brazil. A draft deal, suggested by the Brazilian presidency, contained no reference to past deals to move away from fossil fuels, nor did it have the roadmap pushed for by many EU countries, though notably not the EU itself. Overnight, 14 EU member states joined 22 other countries, many of them highly vulnerable to climate impacts, threatening to collapse the talks over the absence of fossil fuels from the deal. “We cannot support an outcome that does not include a roadmap for implementing a just, orderly, and equitable transition away from fossil fuels,” said a letter from those countries to the Brazilian organizers, seen by POLITICO. Von der Leyen emphasized Friday that the EU was not resiling from its legal climate goals. “We are staying the course,” she said. “We’re very clear that we want to reach those targets. We are well on track for the 2030 target. On the way forward we have to be adaptable and flexible. because thsi is a huge transition taht is happening. No one has done this before. So we really are in uncharted waters.” Asked about von der Leyen’s comments just as he was walking into a United Nations plenary, EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said: “The problem is caused by emissions, and the reality is that the dirtier the fossil fuel, the more damage they are doing.” That, he added, was why the EU was calling for greater efforts to cut planet-warming emissions at COP30. Danish Climate Minister Lars Aagaard, walking beside Hoekstra, said: “Emissions are a consequence of fossil fuels, so I find it a bit hard to see the distinction. What we need to see here is to have the emissions down. That’s what we are aiming for, that’s what we came for.” European lawmakers on the ground in Belém were more critical of von der Leyen’s words. “I believe she’s trying to be diplomatic, but one thing is very clear: We need to exit fossil fuels to lower our emissions,” said Lena Schilling, an MEP from the Greens. “Europe is fighting to increase ambition” on reducing emissions at COP30, “and that’s the goal I think von der Leyen should stand behind, like every member state,” said Mohammed Chahim, vice president of the center-left Socialists & Democrats in the European Parliament. Emissions, he added, “are fully connected to fossil fuels, so I think Europe should support the call of phasing out fossil fuels.” Noting that the focus on tackling emissions rather than their source often implies extensive use of carbon capture technology (CCS), which is as yet unavailable at scale, he referred to something Hoekstra said repeatedly at last year’s climate summit: “Like a very smart commissioner said at the previous COP, you cannot CCS yourself out of everything.”

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.

BELÉM, Brazil — The European Union was notably absent from a group of 82 countries calling for a clear path away from fossil fuels at the U.N. climate talks on Tuesday. In a moment of theater in the Amazon city of Belém, dozens of countries demanded a “roadmap” that would chart their way off fossil fuels — sending the fuels that drive climate change to the fore of a U.N. process that rarely discusses them directly.  But the EU, a self-described climate leader, was not among them. Many EU countries backed the démarche, with ministers from Denmark and Germany taking a prominent role in the announcement.  In a statement, Germany’s Environment Minister Carsten Schneider called on the meeting “to free ourselves from fossil fuels … it can help with access to energy, lowering prices for households and businesses and strengthening our energy security.” For the EU to back the initiative, all countries in the 27-nation bloc would need to unify behind it. The EU has recently undergone a tough process of setting new climate goals that drew opposition from countries with ties to coal and the car industry. “This is completely in the EU interest,” said Jennifer Morgan, Germany’s former climate envoy. “So I’m quite puzzled that there are evidently a couple of member states that are nervous about this.” EU representatives did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.