When French oil giant TotalEnergies bought a $3.9 billion stake in a mammoth natural-gas field off Africa’s east coast in 2019, from Texas company Anadarko Petroleum, Total CEO Patrick Pouyanné hailed it as a "one-of-a-kind asset that perfectly fits with our strategy.” Now, that asset has become a potential major liability, as Total faces charges that it failed to protect its contractors at the gas field from a deadly terrorist attack.
The field sits in a region of Mozambique where the ISIS-linked Islamic militant group called Al-Shabaab has become a menace. In March 2021, the group turned the area into a war zone: About 200 armed men stormed the town of Palma, close to Total’s compound, slaughtering villagers with machetes and bullets. The five-day onslaught is estimated to have killed more than 1,000 locals in the impoverished area, as well as several Total contractors who were killed as they tried to flee the carnage.
