SOMA, the Somali oil and gas explorer chaired by former Tory leader Michael Howard, has stepped up its fightback against the United Nations by commissioning a report into how the agency built its corruption case against the company.
This month a leaked report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea revealed that Soma had agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to senior civil servants in the Somali government.
The UN report said the payments were “improper, unlawful and give rise to a conflict of interest”. The Serious Fraud Office opened an investigation and searched Soma’s offices in St James’s, central London.
The company claimed that the so-called “capacity building arrangements” were common practice in countries lacking industry expertise or infrastructure.
In a letter to the UN Security Council last week, Lord Howard said that the monitoring group had “fundamentally misunderstood the nature, purpose and destination of payments”.
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It is understood that the board has this weekend commissioned an independent report into how the UN conducted its probe. Soma said it is co-operating with the UN but launching its own probe risks further souring relations. The UN’s team in Somalia includes former journalist Jay Bahadur, who wrote a book on Somali pirates. Soma has raised concerns over his methods.
Soma raised $50m (£32m) from billionaire tycoon Alexander Djaparidze in 2013 to fund an exploration programme in the waters off Somalia. It was the first company to go back into the country after it disintegrated into a failed state in 1991.
Soma and Bahadur declined to comment.