Australia Stole $40 Billion From East Timor
[
14 December 2013 ]
The gas field is in
Timor's waters. Australia wanted it. Australia got it by
Espionage, by bullying. The spies told them just
how desperate the Timorese were. It worked a treat. Throw them a few crumbs
and have the rest. $40 billion is pretty useful to a spendthrift government.
PS Alexander Downer,
a lead shit in this affair is telling Cyprus how to
sort itself out.
PPS
Cyprus also has gas worth billions offshore. They
are there like flies on the proverbial.
Read the whole thing at source
And now for something completely different: a spy story that
isn’t about Edward Snowden’s disclosures and the US
National Security Agency's surveillance of everything and everybody.
This one could come straight out of a 1950s spy thriller: a microphone
buried in a wall, a listening post manned by people with headphones, and
transcripts of secret conversations delivered to negotiators.
Now it’s true that Australia is a member of the Gang of Five, more
formally known as the
Five Eyes (the United States, Canada, the United
Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand), which share most of the information
that they acquire through hi-tech mass surveillance. That’s the kind of
spying that Snowden’s leaks are about, and whatever Australia picks up
through this process it presumably shares with its co-conspirators.
It was in this context that Australia listened to the phone conversations
of Indonesia’s president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife, and eight
potential successors. When Indonesia recalled its ambassador from Canberra
and protested, Prime Minister Tony Abbott swatted the protest away with the
line they are all using now: “all governments gather information and all
governments know that every other government gathers information.”
The Indonesian reply was a classic. “I have news for you,” said Foreign
Minister Marty Natalegawa. “We don’t do it. We certainly should not be doing
it among friends.” He was, he said, deeply unhappy about the “dismissive
answer being provided” by the Australian government.
So Australia has managed to alienate its biggest neighbour, probably for
no advantage to itself, just as the United States has alienated Brazil with
the same tactics.
But the kind of spying under discussion here was too shameful to share
even with the other four eyes of the Anglosphere. It was an Australian-only
operation mounted in 2004 to gather information about the negotiating
position of a very poor neighbouring country, East Timor, so that Australia
could rip its neighbour off in a treaty that divided a rich gas field on the
seabed between them.
The treaty in question,
Certain Maritime Arrangements in the Timor Sea,
always seemed a bit peculiar. The CMATS treaty gave Australia a half share
in the massive Greater Sunrise field, which is said to be worth $40 billion.
But that field lies just 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of East Timor, and
400 kilometres (250 miles) from Australia.
The normal rule on international seabed rights would put the boundary
equidistant between the two countries, but that would have given East Timor
sovereignty over the entire gas field. Instead, CMATS postponed a final
settlement of the seabed boundary for 50 years, and in the meantime gave
Australia 50 per cent of the revenue from the Greater Sunrise field.
The existing gas field off East Timor's coast has only about 10 years'
life left, and the East Timor government depends on gas revenues for 95 per
cent of its income, so it was very vulnerable in those negotiations. The
Australian negotiators could exploit that vulnerability because they had
daily updates on how desperate their Timorese opposite numbers were: the
Australian Secret Intelligence Service
had bugged the prime minister’s and the cabinet offices.
Four
ASIS operatives did the job, pretending to be part of a team of
Australian aid workers that was renovating East Timor’s government offices.
The man who gave the order was Australia’s foreign minister at the time,
Alex Downer
, who now runs a public relations firm that represents Woodside
Petroleum, a major Australian company that was the main beneficiary of
the treaty. Funny how things work out.
The operation would never have come to light if the former director of
technical operations at
ASIS, who led the bugging operation, had not had an
attack of conscience on learning of Downer’s link to Woodside. He told East
Timor about it, and the Timorese government then brought an action before
the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague demanding that the CMATS
treaty be cancelled.
The Australian government’s response was to arrest the whistleblower and
cancel his passport last week so that he could not travel to The Hague to
testify, and to raid the Sydney offices of
Bernard Collaery, the lawyer who
is representing East Timor before the Court. [ The search warrant was
granted by a criminal called
George Brandis,
the
Attorney General of Australia using an allegation of national
security - Editor ].
The documents seized include an affidavit summarising the whistleblower’s
testimony at the court and correspondence between Collaery and his client,
Timorese President Xanana Gusmao. It’s more of the same sort of behaviour:
the Australian government has decided to brazen it out.
Can Australia get away with this? Not legally. As Collaery says, “it was
a carefully premeditated, involved, very lengthy operation with premeditated
breaches of the
Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, and premeditated
breaches of the
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. This is a
criminal conspiracy,
a break-in on sovereign territory and a breach of Australian law.” And he
has three more whistleblowers lined up to testify too.
But the case may still be settled out of court, because East Timor is
still desperate. Woodside has not yet started developing the Greater Sunrise
field, and it will never do so if there isn’t a deal. Offer East Timor
another 10 per cent and a promise to go ahead, and it will probably drop the
case. The poor cannot afford justice.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist who writes a weekly column
for Embassy.
editor@embassynews.ca
Woodside
Petroleum ex Wiki [ a crooked bunch of chancers ]
Woodside Petroleum
Limited is an Australian
petroleum exploration and production company. Woodside is the largest
operator of oil and gas production in Australia and also Australia’s largest
independent dedicated oil and gas company.[2]
It is a public company listed on the
Australian Securities Exchange and has its headquarters in
Perth,
Western Australia........
The Greater Sunrise gas development lies in the Timor Sea north of
Australia and includes the Sunrise and Troubadour fields, which were
discovered in 1974. Greater Sunrise is located about 450 kilometres (280 mi)
north-west of Darwin and 150 kilometres (93 mi) south-east of Timor-Leste.
Approximately 80% of the fields lie within Australian waters, with the
remainder in jointly administered waters. [ Is this the lie direct? -
Editor ] The Greater Sunrise fields have a total contingent dry gas
resource of 5.13 trillion cubic feet (145 billion cubic metres) and 225.9
million barrels (35.92×106 m3)
of condensate. The Sunrise JV participants are Woodside (operator) (33.4%),
ConocoPhillips (30%), Shell (26.6%) and Osaka Gas (10%).[10][unreliable
source?]
In April 2010 Shell's
floating liquefied natural gas technology was selected by the Sunrise
Joint Venture for developing the Greater Sunrise gas fields in the Timor
Sea. The Woodside-operated JV is now seeking to engage regulators on the
concept selection process.[11]
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/12/australias-timor-spying-scandal-more-whistleblowers-emerge-2843220.html
Australia’s Timor Spying Scandal. More Whistleblowers Emerge
Woodside
Petroleum colludes with
Noble Energy. See
Leviathan Natural Gas Field May Be Worth 70% More than Estimated
Noble Energy
is involved in Mediterranean gas i.e. with
Cyprus &
Israel
http://www.jewocity.com/blog/leviathan-natural-gas-field-may-be-worth-70-more-than-estimated/6427
