Chad's high
court has ordered an oil consortium headed by America’s ExxonMobil
to pay $74 billion in fines for alleged unpaid taxes, Bloomberg
reports. The court has also demanded the oil giant pay $819 million
in overdue royalties.
The record
figure is almost five times the country’s GDP of about $13 billion.
The fine is the biggest ever imposed on an energy company, exceeding
the $61.6 billion penalty against BP over the Gulf of Mexico disaster
that killed 11 workers and left a spill of over 3 million barrels of
oil.
Experts say
Chad is unlikely to see most of the fine. “Nobody is going to
cooperate outside of Chad in enforcing this judgment; this leaves
Exxon exposed to possibly losing everything it has inside Chad but
that’s such an extraordinary number, I can’t imagine the assets
they have there are worth that much,” said Jeffery Atik, who
teaches international law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, as
quoted by Bloomberg. Exxon is currently deciding what to do next as
it disagrees with the Chadian court’s ruling. The company declined
to comment on the figure.
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