BERLIN — Friedrich Merz embarks on his first trip to the Persian Gulf region as chancellor on Wednesday in search of new energy and business deals he sees as critical to reducing Germany’s dependence on the U.S. and China. The three-day trip with stops in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates illustrates Merz’s approach to what he calls a dangerous new epoch of “great power politics” — one in which the U.S. under President Donald Trump is no longer a reliable partner. European countries must urgently embrace their own brand of hard power by forging new global trade alliances, including in the Middle East, or risk becoming subject to the coercion of greater powers, Merz argues. Accompanying Merz on the trip is a delegation of business executives looking to cut new deals on everything from energy to defense. But one of the chancellor’s immediate goals is to reduce his country’s growing dependence on U.S. liquefied natural gas, or LNG, which has replaced much of the Russian gas that formerly flowed to Germany through the Nord Stream pipelines. Increasingly, German leaders across the political spectrum believe they’ve replaced their country’s unhealthy dependence on Russian energy with an increasingly precarious dependence on the U.S. Early this week, Merz’s economy minister, Katherina Reiche, traveled to Saudi Arabia ahead of the chancellor to sign a memorandum to deepen the energy ties between both countries, including a planned hydrogen energy deal. “When partnerships that we have relied on for decades start to become a little fragile, we have to look for new partners,” Reiche said in Riyadh. ‘EXCESSIVE DEPENDENCE’ Last year, 96 percent of German LNG imports came from the U.S, according to the federal government. While that amount makes up only about one-tenth of the country’s total natural gas imports, the U.S. share is set to rise sharply over the next years, in part because the EU agreed to purchase $750 billion worth of energy from the U.S. by the end of 2028 as part of its trade agreement with the Trump administration. The EU broadly is even more dependent on U.S. LNG, which accounted for more than a quarter of the bloc’s natural gas imports in 2025. This share is expected to rise to 40 percent by 2030. German politicians across the political spectrum are increasingly pushing for Merz’s government to find new alternatives. “After Russia’s war of aggression, we have learned the hard way that excessive dependence on individual countries can have serious consequences for our country,” said Sebastian Roloff, a lawmaker focusing on energy for the center-left Social Democrats, who rule in a coalition with Merz’s conservatives. Roloff said Trump’s recent threat to take over Greenland and the new U.S. national security strategy underscored the need to “avoid creating excessive dependence again” and diversify sources of energy supply. The Trump administration’s national security strategy vows to use “American dominance” in oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy to “project power” globally, raising fears in Europe that the U.S. will use energy exports to gain leverage over the EU. Last year, 96 percent of German LNG imports came from the U.S, according to the federal government. | Pool photo by Lars-Josef Klemmer/EPA That’s why Merz and his delegation are also seeking closer ties to Qatar, one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of natural gas as well as the United Arab Emirates, another major LNG producer. Last week, the EU’s energy chief, Dan Jørgensen, said the bloc would step up efforts to to reduce it’s dependence on U.S. LNG., including by dealing more with Qatar. One EU diplomat criticised Merz for seeking such cooperation on a national level. Germany is going “all in on gas power, of course, but I can’t see why Merz would be running errands on the EU’s behalf,” said the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘AUTHORITARIAN STRONGMEN’ Merz will also be looking to attract more foreign investment and deepen trade ties with the Gulf states as part of a wider strategy of forging news alliances with “middle powers” globally and reduce dependence on U.S. and Chinese markets. The EU initiated trade talks with the United Arab Emirates last spring. Gulf states like Saudi Arabia also have their own concerns about dependencies on the U.S., particularly in the area of arms purchases. Germany’s growing defense industry is increasingly seen as promising partner, particularly following Berlin’s loosening of arms export restrictions. “For our partners in the region, cooperation in the defense industry will certainly also be an important topic,” a senior government official with knowledge of the trip said.  But critics point out that leaders of autocracies criticized for human rights abuses don’t make for viable partners on energy, trade and defense. Last week, the EU’s energy chief, Dan Jørgensen, said the bloc would step up efforts to to reduce it’s dependence on U.S. LNG., including by dealing more with Qatar. | Jose Sena Goulao/EPA “It’s not an ideal solution,” said Loyle Campbell, an expert on climate and energy policy for the German Council on Foreign Relations. “Rather than having high dependence on American LNG, you’d go shake hands with semi-dictators or authoritarian strongmen to try and reduce your risk to the bigger elephant in the room.” Merz, however, may not see a moral contradiction. Europe can’t maintain its strength and values in the new era of great powers, he argues, without a heavy dollop of Realpolitik. “We will only be able to implement our ideas in the world, at least in part, if we ourselves learn to speak the language of power politics,” Merz recently said. Ben Munster contributed to this report.

French energy giant TotalEnergies announced Thursday that it is restarting its natural gas project in Mozambique, after a massacre at the site led to the company being accused of complicity in war crimes in November. “I am delighted to announce the full restart of the Mozambique LNG project … The force majeure is over,” TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné said at a relaunch ceremony attended by Mozambican President Daniel Chapo. The project, billed as Africa’s largest liquefied natural gas development, was suspended in 2021 in the wake of a deadly insurgent attack. A 2024 POLITICO investigation revealed that Mozambican soldiers based inside TotalEnergies’ concession just south of the Tanzanian border, subsequently brutalized, starved, suffocated, executed or disappeared around 200 men in its gatehouse from June to September 2021. In December 2025, the British and Dutch governments withdrew some $2.2 billion in support for the project, with the Dutch releasing a report that corroborated many elements of the POLITICO investigation.  TotalEnergies has denied the allegations, saying its own “extensive research” into the allegations has “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.” The Mozambican government has also rejected claims that its forces committed war crimes. The revelations nonetheless prompted scrutiny from French lawmakers and criticism of TotalEnergies’ security arrangements in conflict zones. The Mozambique site has been plagued by an Islamist insurgency. “Companies and their executives are not neutral actors when they operate in conflict zones,” said Clara Gonzales of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. “If they enable or fuel crimes, they might be complicit and should be held accountable.” Speaking Thursday in Mozambique, Pouyanné said activity would now accelerate. “You will see a massive ramp-up in activity in coming months … a first offshore vessel has already been mobilized,” he said. According to a statement by the company, construction has resumed both onshore and offshore at the site, with around 4,000 workers currently mobilized. The project is roughly 40 percent complete, with the first LNG production expected in 2029. TotalEnergies holds a 26.5 percent stake in the Mozambique LNG consortium. A relaunch clears the way for billions of dollars in gas exports.

BRUSSELS — The European Union will step up efforts to diversify away from American liquefied natural gas following U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to take control of Greenland, EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen said Wednesday. Calling the events of recent week a “clear wake-up call,” Jørgensen said growing geopolitical instability — from Russia’s war in Ukraine to rising tensions with Washington — means the EU can no longer assume energy ties are immune from security shocks. “These are very turbulent times,” Jørgensen told journalists at a briefing in Brussels. “What has made the situation more serious and complex is the strained relationship to the U.S. and the fact that we have an American president that does not exclude using force against Greenland,” he said. The U.S. already supplies more than a quarter of the EU’s gas, up from just 5 percent five years ago, with dependence set to rise further as a total ban on Russian gas takes effect. But Jørgensen said the Commission is now actively seeking alternative suppliers to the U.S. and plans to deepen energy ties with a range of countries in the coming months, including Canada, Qatar and Algeria. “Canada for sure, Qatar, North African countries,” he said, adding that Brussels is also working to secure non-Russian sources of nuclear fuel for member countries that still rely on Moscow. While stressing that Brussels does not want a trade war with Washington, Jørgensen acknowledged mounting concern inside the EU that it risks “replacing one dependency with another” after rapidly pivoting from Russian gas to U.S. LNG following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. “It has never been our policy to start trading less with the U.S., and we don’t want trade conflicts,” he said. “But it is also clear that geopolitical turmoil … has been a wake-up call. We have to be able to take care of ourselves.” The commissioner said he had not yet spoken with his U.S. counterpart since Trump’s remarks on Greenland, and said the EU has not set a formal threshold for how much U.S. LNG would be considered too much. For now, American gas remains “essential” to replace Russian supplies, he said.

Europe has a chance Monday to flex its independence from the United States by embracing the energy technology that President Donald Trump hates the most. After a fortnight spent staring into the abyss of conflict with America, ministers from across the continent will meet in Hamburg to agree to massively boost the North Sea’s production of wind energy. The Hamburg Declaration — to be signed by Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the U.K., the Netherlands, and Norway — will pledge to build 100 gigawatts of joint offshore wind projects. That’s more than the current total electricity generation capacity of the U.K. The summit has taken on new meaning since Trump’s attempts to coerce his NATO allies to hand over Greenland pushed the transatlantic alliance to — perhaps beyond —breaking point. “Homegrown clean power,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen wrote in POLITICO on Monday, offers an alternative to the EU’s deepening reliance on imported liquefied natural gas, much of which now comes from the U.S. “Relying so heavily on fossil fuels, whether they come from Russia or anywhere else, cannot give us the energy security and prosperity we need. It leaves us incredibly vulnerable to the volatility of international markets and pressure from external actors,” they said. Harnessing the North Sea’s gusty winds requires political cooperation that bridges national differences, the Brexit divide and political backlash to the expansion of renewables. While the offshore industry in the U.K. has recently seen strong interest, countries such as Germany and France are struggling to get companies to bid for new projects. And clean energy boosterism cannot mask the fact that gas, while slowly declining, is still almost one quarter of Europe’s energy supply and central to Europe’s heavy industry. Nor are all European countries and companies convinced there is any need to stop the boats pouring in from Texas. Trump knows he has Europe over a barrel. Last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he derided wind turbines and the Europeans that install them as “losers.” His self-interest was barely veiled. The U.S. is the world’s biggest exporter of LNG and since the EU began shutting off Russian pipeline gas, the bloc’s imports from the U.S. have risen fourfold, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a non-profit climate group. Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, boasted in Davos that U.S. exports had been able to “displace most all of the Russian gas” and foresaw “robust energy trade” going forward; trade that would be, “in the short run … dominated by exports from the United States into Europe.” He called for the EU to remove “barriers” to the new era of transatlantic gas exports, namechecking Europe’s carbon border tax and its corporate environmental regulations. The U.S., he said, is “working with our colleagues here in Europe to remove those barriers.” U.S. gas was celebrated by European officials as key part of their strategy for ditching Russian energy, a savior from across the seas — alongside, of course, the growing the use of renewables like wind and solar. But the growing reliance has taken on an entirely new geopolitical significance under Trump. “The big weakness was and is that fossil fuel supply was moving from one unreliable supply source (Russia) to a set of other potentially unreliable supply sources and that over-dependency on any one of them risked a repeat of previous problems,” said a European Commission official involved in the EU’s efforts to cut dependence on Russian gas, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “I just didn’t think we’d have to worry about the U.S. — that was before Trump,” they added. The North Sea summit was first set up in 2022 as an antidote to Russian energy dependence. Its third edition will be overshadowed by fears — voiced by energy analysts, if not necessarily by some European leaders still eager to appease Trump — that the U.S. could weaponize gas in the way Vladimir Putin did against the Europeans before and after his invasion of Ukraine. This year several heads of state, energy ministers as well as the biggest industry players are expected to attend, the German hosts said. The goal is to strengthen the cooperation between neighboring states along the North Sea. Three declarations are set to be signed, according to German government officials familiar with the matter. The heads of states will sign the Hamburg Declaration pledging close cooperation and united efforts to secure critical infrastructure. The energy ministers will also sign their own declaration focusing on the necessary grid infrastructure for offshore wind parks including financing measures and accelerating planning measures. And lastly there will be the Joint Offshore Wind Investment Pact for the North Sea, signed by the energy ministers and key industry players. Both sides are promising to do everything in their power to bring offshore wind back on track. “This is a great opportunity to remind us why the transformation of the energy system matters,” Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s Executive Vice President told POLITICO after Trump’s attack on green energy in Davos. Renewable sources of energy “mean freedom, lower dependence and vulnerabilities.” CAN’T STOP GUZZLING   While pivoting to clean power is an obvious priority, “you cannot dream away the existing dependence on oil and gas imports,” said Thijs Van de Graaf, a specialist in the geopolitics of energy at the Ghent Institute for International and European Studies. The Commission has limited power to dictate where companies obtain their LNG supplies, and the dizzying pace of growth in purchases of the U.S. product will be difficult to reverse. “Unilateral action from the EU to limit its purchases is … unlikely,” argued Jack Reid, a lead economist at economic advisory firm Oxford Economics in a note published last week. He pointed out that for all the EU’s efforts to diversify, Russia remains the bloc’s second largest supplier of LNG. On top of that, the importers themselves are hesitant to curb such a roaring trade. POLITICO asked several German companies and received a range of responses. Some foresaw no change in the U.S. trade, while others, including Uniper, said flexibility may be needed. “This is not a relationship we are stepping back from, on the contrary, we are deepening cooperation with U.S. partners at pace,” said Alexandros Exarchou, the CEO of Atlantic See, a Greek LNG import venture that recently struck a 20-year deal with U.S. firm Venture Global to import half a million tons of LNG annually. Others have more pressing energy challenges to address. For Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, reassessing the U.S. trade relationship is unthinkable as war with Russia rages on. “We have no plans to reduce our engagement with U.S. suppliers,” James O’Brien, the head of trading at DTEK’s trading unit, D.Trading, told POLITICO. “In fact, we are actively seeking to expand our volumes to cover the critical supply gap in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe from 2026/27.” The U.S. LNG market remains “the most liquid and flexible in the world,” he said, adding that for Ukraine, U.S. LNG “is not a risk, it is a lifeline.” Many European officials “are still living that old liberal world,” said Van de Graaf, and expect a return to normalcy and stability in EU-U.S. trade. “That ideological position is no longer tenable in light of all of what is transpiring.”

Listen on * Spotify * Apple Music * Amazon Music Davos rückt in den Mittelpunkt der Weltpolitik. Zum Start des World Economic Forum stellt sich die zentrale Frage, wie geschlossen EU, NATO und G7 auf Donald Trump reagieren und welche geopolitischen Weichen in den kommenden Tagen in der Schweiz gestellt werden. Gordon Repinski über ein Forum, das von Trump, Grönland, Zoll-Drohungen und der Zukunft des transatlantischen Verhältnis geprägt wird. In Deutschland rückt derweil auch wegen Trump die Energiepolitik in den Fokus. Die deutschen Gasspeicher sind so leer wie selten zu Jahresbeginn. Was politisch gewollt war, könnte sich mittelfristig als Risiko erweisen. Im Gespräch mit Josh Groeneveld vom POLITICO Pro-Newsletter “Energie & Klima am Morgen” geht es um die Ursachen der niedrigen Füllstände, um Marktmechanismen, LNG-Abhängigkeiten von den USA und wie verwundbar Europa in einer angespannten geopolitischen Lage tatsächlich ist. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview spricht der CDU-Spitzenkandidat für die Landtagswahl in Rheinland-Pfalz, Gordon Schnieder, über Wirtschaftspolitik, Energiepreise und die Erwartungen an Friedrich Merz. Es geht um Vertrauen, Investitionen und Steuerpolitik. Das Berlin Playbook als Podcast gibt es jeden Morgen ab 5 Uhr. Gordon Repinski und das POLITICO-Team liefern Politik zum Hören – kompakt, international, hintergründig. Für alle Hauptstadt-Profis: Der Berlin Playbook-Newsletter bietet jeden Morgen die wichtigsten Themen und Einordnungen. Jetzt kostenlos abonnieren. Mehr von Host und POLITICO Executive Editor Gordon Repinski: Instagram: @gordon.repinski | X: @GordonRepinski. POLITICO Deutschland – ein Angebot der Axel Springer Deutschland GmbH Axel-Springer-Straße 65, 10888 Berlin Tel: +49 (30) 2591 0 information@axelspringer.de Sitz: Amtsgericht Berlin-Charlottenburg, HRB 196159 B USt-IdNr: DE 214 852 390 Geschäftsführer: Carolin Hulshoff Pol, Mathias Sanchez Luna

LONDON — Prime Minister Keir Starmer usually goes out of his way not to annoy Donald Trump. So he better hope the windmill-hating U.S. president doesn’t notice what the U.K. just did. In a fillip for the global offshore wind industry, Starmer’s government on Wednesday announced its biggest-ever down payment on the technology. It agreed to price guarantees, funded by billpayers to the tune of up to £1.8 billion (€2.08 billion) a year, for eight major projects in England, Scotland and Wales. The schemes have the capacity to generate 8.4 gigawatts of electricity, the U.K. energy department said — enough to power 12 million homes. It represented the biggest “wind auction in Europe to date,” said industry group WindEurope. It’s also an energy strategy that could have been tailor-made to rankle Trump. The U.S. president has repeatedly expressed a profound loathing for wind turbines and has tried to use his powers to halt construction on projects already underway in the U.S. — sending shockwaves across the global industry. Even when appearing alongside Starmer at press conferences, Trump has been unable to hide his disgust at the very sight of windmills. “You are paying in Scotland and in the U.K. … to have these ugly monsters all over the place,” he said, sitting next to Starmer during a visit to his Turnberry golf course last year. The spinning blades, Trump complained, would “kill all your birds.” At the time, the prime minister explained meekly that the U.K. was seeking a “mix” of energy sources. But this week’s investments speak far louder about his government’s priorities. The U.K.’s strategy — part of a plan to run the British power grid on 95 percent clean electricity by 2030 — is a clear signal that for all Starmer’s attempts to appease Trump, the U.K. will not heed Washington’s assertions that fossil fuels are the only way to deliver affordable bills and secure supply. “With these results, Britain is taking back control of our energy sovereignty,” said Starmer’s Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, a former leader of the Labour party. “With these results, Britain is taking back control of our energy sovereignty,” said Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. | Pool photo by Justin Tallis via Getty Images While not mentioning Trump or the U.S., he said the U.K. wanted to “stand on our two feet” and not depend on “markets controlled by petrostates and dictators.” WIND VS. GAS The goal of the U.K.’s offshore wind drive is to reduce reliance on gas for electricity generation. One of the most gas-dependent countries in Europe, the U.K. was hit hard in 2022 by the regional gas price spike that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The government ended up spending tens of billions of pounds to pay a portion of every household energy bill in the country to fend off widespread hardship. It’s a scenario that Miliband and Starmer want to avoid in future by focusing on producing electricity from domestic sources like offshore wind that are not subject to the ups and downs of global fossil fuel markets. Trump, by contrast, wants to keep Europe hooked on gas — specifically, American gas. The U.S. National Security Strategy, updated late last year, states Trump’s desire to use American fossil fuel exports to “project power.” Trump has already strong-armed the European Union into committing to buy $750 billion worth of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a quid pro quo for tariff relief. No one in Starmer’s government explicitly named Trump or the U.S. on Wednesday. But Chris Stark, a senior official in Miliband’s energy department tasked with delivering the 2030 goal, noted that “every megawatt of offshore wind that we’re bringing on is a few more metric tons of LNG that we don’t need to import.” The U.K.’s investment in offshore wind also provides welcome relief to a global industry that has been seriously shaken both by soaring inflation and interest rates — and more recently by a Trump-inspired backlash against net zero and clean energy. “It’s a relief for the offshore sector … It’s a relief generally, that the U.K. government is able to lean into very large positive investment stories in U.K. infrastructure,” said Tom Glover, U.K. country chair of the German energy firm RWE, which was the biggest winner in the latest offshore wind investment, securing contracts for 6.9 gigawatts of capacity. A second energy industry figure, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record, said the U.K.’s plans were a “great signal for the global offshore wind sector” after a difficult few years — “not least the stuff in the U.S.” The other big winner was British firm SSE, which has plans to build one of the world’s largest-ever offshore wind projects, Berwick Bank — off the coast of Donald Trump’s beloved Scotland.

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. 

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.

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 — 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.