Iraq
Chevron supported the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein by signing marketing contracts with Saddam Hussein's Iraq as early as 1989, and continued to market Iraqi oil and refine it at its U.S. refineries largely without abate through to today. In 2007, Chevron paid $30 million to settle charges brought by the SEC that it had paid illegal kickbacks to the Hussein regime to win contracts.
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Chevron has worked to help design a new model for Iraq's oil system, from a nationalized oil system to a largely privatized model open to U.S. oil company access and control. Chevron has lobbied the U.S. federal government on Iraq every year since at least 2006 (when public lobbying disclosures begin), including specifically on the Iraq Oil Law in both 2007 and 2008.
In 2007 Chevron (with France's Total) signed service contracts for the super giant Majnoon field and the Nahr Bin Omar field. But the contracts were never enforced, as they were dependent upon passage of the Iraq Oil Law.
Chevron is not deterred. When asked about its lack of success in securing a contract in Iraq, new CEO John Watson explained, "as you may know, we spent a great deal of time working with the Iraqis, providing technical assistance, training for the better part of this last decade, and we certainly had partnering arrangements that we were considering and had done a great deal of technical work and hoped to participate in the two bid rounds that took place in Iraq... Clearly, these are large resources. Clearly, it would be desirable to have a presence there... We just couldn't make it work so we chose not to submit bids rather than to submit bids that we knew would not be competitive."
U.S. service members cite this "oil agenda" as a contributing factor to the Iraqi insurgency.
More information on Chevron in Iraq can be found in the Alternative Annual Report
