Image: (c) Laure Cops, Wouter Vanmol and Berber Verpoest. This Tuesday, the World Bank approved two $400m loans to Azerbaijan and Turkey to fund the construction of the Turkish section of the Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline pipeline called TANAP. Today, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is due to discuss another loan to TANAP. (Update: loan approved.) This comes a week after the Asian Development Bank (ADB) approved a controversial $1bn loan to the Azerbaijani gas field that will feed the pipeline. These bank loans are being considered despite an alleged corruption scandal involving the bribery of Council of Europe MPs by Azerbaijan in 2013. As the Italian courts have recently uncovered, this was likely in exchange for voting against a key report on the country’s political prisoners.
The Euro-Caspian Mega Pipeline is a very important project for Azerbaijan, BP and the UK. A gigantic piece of fossil fuel infrastructure, it will run over 3,500km to bring gas to Europe from the BP-operated Shah Deniz fields off the coast of Azerbaijan. It will thus further entrench the Azerbaijani regime financially and politically. The scheme, which has been under discussion since 2000, was described by BP CEO Bob Dudley as “one of the largest and most complex... undertaken by the global oil and gas industry”.
Ilham Aliyev’s regime, which has ruled the fossil fuel-rich Azerbaijan for 23 years, and BP have been bound together since 1994, when they signed the “Contract of the Century” to extract oil from the Caspian Sea. Aliyev’s corrupt and repressive regime is underpinned by oil and gas revenues — $48 billion of $135 billion in state revenues from oil has been diverted to offshore tax havens. To date, BP has sunk $10 billion into the initial development of the Shah Deniz Field from which the gas will be sourced.
