Total Disaster: Will the UK government use taxpayer finance to enable a human rights nightmare abroad?
The briefing details the many problems associated with the Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Project. If the UK Prime Minister goes ahead with this project he risks thousands of lives in Mozambique, his claims to climate leadership and making the UK complicit in corruption.
Keir Starmer has inherited a controversial decision from Boris Johnson’s government. The UK Prime Minister must decide whether USD $1.5 billion of UK taxpayer support should be used to enable one of the most controversial infrastructure projects of modern times: The Mozambique Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) Project.
But, the project is stuck in a quagmire of allegations around two separate massacres, the death of a British citizen, corruption claims, and clear evidence that the project is fuelling a deadly insurgency that has already delayed the project by years.
To name only some of the problems with this project:
- The insurgency continues to rage across the region, fuelled by resentment of the gas project.
- Mozambique’s army stands accused of the torture, rape and murder of civilians at the Mozambique LNG project site, where soldiers allegedly used the project site gatehouse as a makeshift prison.
- A Mozambican army task force protecting the LNG project have separately been accused of multiple crimes against civilians in the area, including theft, rape and murder. Documents show TotalEnergies was aware of these allegations but continued to fund the task force anyway.
- Millions of dollars in gas revenues have recently been reported missing from Mozambique state bank accounts.
- A UK citizen’s death in the 2021 Palma massacre has not yet been fully investigated, with an inquest due this year. Meanwhile, in a high-profile French court case, relatives of other victims caught up in the massacre accuse TotalEnergies of leaving their relatives to die.
- The UK government faces human rights and climate-related legal risk if it funds this project, which could emit more greenhouse gas pollution over its lifetime than the entire annual emissions of the European Union.
- To top it all off, by the time the gas project comes online, research suggests that peaking global gas demand means there may no longer be a market for the project, making it uneconomical.