On Friday (14), the French courts appointed a judge to investigate the complaint against the oil company TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter and omission of aid during an extremist attack in 2021 in the province of Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique.
According to the Nanterre Public Prosecutor’s Office, the survivors and families of the victims of this terrorist attack, which took place in March 2021 in the Palma district, filed a complaint in the autumn of 2023 against the French company, accusing it of negligence during the time it was working in the country.
The organisation, quoted by Lusa, said that the victims (three survivors and four relatives of South African and British nationality) accuse the multinational of failing to guarantee the safety of its subcontractors.
The attack in Palma, claimed by an African branch of the extremist group Islamic State (IS), began on 24 March, lasted several days and caused an unknown number of victims to date among the local population and TotalEnergies’ subcontractors.
At the time, the Mozambican authorities reported only 30 deaths, but independent journalist Alexander Perry said that the total was more than 1,402 civilians dead or missing, including 55 subcontractors, pointing out that many of the victims had taken refuge in a hotel on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by the extremists.
TotalEnergies is being investigated in France for manslaughter in Cabo Delgado
The incident led to the suspension of the Area 1 project, led by TotalEnergies, which represents a total investment of 20 billion dollars. The group’s chairman, Patrick Pouyanné, has since announced that he expected the project to be relaunched before the end of 2023, but this has not happened.
This comes days after the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) announced that it had approved financing of almost 5 billion dollars (320 billion meticals) for the Mozambique LNG project, operated by TotalEnergies. The decision removes a critical obstacle to the resumption of operations at the project, which had been suspended since 2021 due to armed violence in Cabo Delgado.
EXIM had already approved a loan of 4.7 billion dollars (300 billion meticals) under Donald Trump’s first administration, but the financing needed to be re-approved due to the interruption in construction. TotalEnergies is also awaiting funding confirmations from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
Mozambique has three development projects approved to exploit the natural gas reserves of the Rovuma basin, classified among the largest in the world, all located off the coast of Cabo Delgado province.
Two of these projects are larger and involve channelling the gas from the seabed to land, cooling it in a plant and then exporting it by sea in a liquid state.
One is led by TotalEnergies (Area 1 consortium) and work progressed until it was suspended indefinitely after the armed attack on Palma in March 2021, when the French energy company declared that it would only resume work when the area was safe. The other is the investment, still unannounced, led by ExxonMobil and Eni (Area 4 consortium).
