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This oil and gas firm spent $1m on US lobbying while its Georgian workers went unpaid

Frontera Resources, a post-Soviet ‘gold rush’ firm, spent nearly $1m as it sought to use the power of the US Congress in an international arbitration dispute with Georgia

By Thomas Rowley and Shota Kincha
This oil and gas firm spent $1m on US lobbying while its Georgian workers went unpaid
Sign for Frontera Resources' site in eastern Georgia | Image: Shota Kincha / OC Media
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A US oil and gas company spent nearly $1m on lobbying as it attempted to sway an international arbitration case with Georgia, openDemocracy, OC Media and Sludge report today.

For years, Frontera Resources promised Georgia and other Black Sea states their “energy independence”.

The company was founded in 1997 by Bill White, a former US deputy secretary of energy, alongside the son of a former US treasury secretary and the son of the chairman of US oil giant Conoco. But since its beginnings in the post-Soviet ‘gold rush’ years, when Western companies sought new and cheap business opportunities abroad, Frontera has fallen on hard times.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0