Unaoil

For 2023, Unaoil is controlled by the wealthy Ahsani family from Monaco. Its founder, Ata Ahsani, was engaged in the engineering business in Iran before the 1979 revolution. Like many secular and relatively wealthy Iranians, he left to arrange his life in the West.

By 1991, he had founded Unaoil. For 2023, he is its chairman. The CEO is his son Cyrus, a prominent socialite from Monaco who is treasurer of the Small State Ambassadors Club, whose honorary president is Prince Albert II. Saman Ahsani, Cyrus's brother, is Unaoil's chief operating officer and a prominent figure in the Iranian emigrant community of London.

For 2023, American companies Halliburton, Honeywell, KBR and FMC Technologies, Korean manufacturers Samsung and Hyundai, British Rolls-Royce and German Man Turbo all worked with Unaoil, according to internal documents. Among Unaoil's customers are hundreds more well-known companies.

Unaoil has worked in Iraq, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and more than a dozen other countries.

History

2019: Guilty plea and verdict in bribery case for benefit of client companies

After a journalistic investigation, the US Department of Justice launched an investigation, the details of which were not disclosed until 2019. The inquiry found Unaoil paid bribes on behalf of 27 companies, including SBM Offshore and Rolls-Royce. It was found that Unaoil was a major intermediary for Western companies that paid bribes in order to obtain energy contracts around the world.

Ata Ahsani's sons, Saman and Cyrus Ahsani - former chief operating officer and CEO of Unaoil respectively - pleaded guilty. In 2019, Saman and Cyrus Ahsani spoke at closed hearings, and key documents were kept under the heading 'secret'.

The MoJ certificate, which was not previously reported, says Saman Ahsani set up a complex network of shell companies and bank accounts to facilitate 'bribes negotiated by his father [Ata] and brother'.

Saman Ahsani was sentenced to just over a year in U.S. prison in January 2023, after pleading guilty along with his brother Cyrus as part of a deal with the investigation. According to US prosecutors, Saman and Cyrus Ahsani helped corrupt ways to bribe millions of dollars to officials in various countries - from Libya to Kazakhstan - to obtain oil and gas contracts for large companies.

2011: "Payments" in Iraq to obtain contracts in the oil sector

Unaoil made the payments in an attempt to influence at least five Iraqi officials making decisions on lucrative contracts for oil production and infrastructure maintenance in the country. Four of them were mentioned in emails under code names:

• Hussein al-Shahristani served as Minister of Energy from 2006 to 2010, was Deputy Prime Minister under Nouri al-Maliki in 2010-2014, and briefly became Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2014. The company gave him the codename 'Teacher'. For 2023, he is the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq for power.

• Karim Luaibi, who succeeded Shahristani as oil minister, who was called 'M'.

• Kifah Numan, head of the Southern Oil Company until 2009.

• Dhia Jaffar al-Mousavi, CEO of Iraq's Southern Oil Company from 2009 to 2015, when he became the country's deputy oil minister. The emails refer to him as' The Lighthouse '.

• Odai al-Quraishi, another Southern Oil Company employee, codenamed 'Ivan'.

The two most important people Unaoil tried to bribe in Iraq were so senior that the company was forced to use an intermediary - Ahmed al-Jibouri, codenamed 'Doctor' - to try to contact them. In 2010 and 2011, Unaoil paid Djiburi at least $20 million in an attempt to influence Shahristani and Luaibi.

Unaoil employee Bazil al-Jarah, who handled the company's Iraqi business, said he believed Jibouri was not just a lobbyist, but was handing over some of his remuneration to Shahristani and Luaibi. 'He is a tool,' Al Jarah wrote in a Skype conversation that was copied and pasted into an email. 'The people standing above him are real greedy mu * * ki'. In another email, Al Jarah described promising '1.5 days of leave' - the code for paying $1.5 million - for Djiburi's' side '. Djibouri 'passed on this information to the' Teacher 'and on the basis of this the' Teacher 'gave the go-ahead,' Al Jarah added.

It was possible to decipher these code designations as a result of a leak from the company's internal server - then tens of thousands of emails fell into the hands of journalists. The management and management of Unaoil are not personnel officers of the special services. Their lack of experience in working with classified data allowed investigators to quickly draw up a complete picture of what is happening.

From the full context of the emails, it became clear that 'holidays' are bribes, one day of which corresponds to $1 million. Sometimes an invoice for the appropriate amount was attached directly to a letter mentioning 'leave'.

In several emails, Unaoil employees gave enough details to identify the people behind the code names. In one letter, for example, Unaoil staff describe how the Prime Minister sent 'The Teacher' to inspect a particular site. From that day's news reports - and subsequent responses in the email chain - it becomes clear that 'Teacher' is Shahristani.

When Saddam Hussein was still in power, Shahristani, a nuclear physicist by training, was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib prison for years after refusing to help with his country's nuclear weapons program.

There is no direct evidence that the money Unaoil paid Djiburi actually went to Shahristani or Luaibi. But this does not absolve the company of responsibility, since even agreeing to pay a bribe, regardless of whether it was executed, is illegal in many countries.

2008: Lobbying for the interests of the American KBR in Kazakhstan

US industrial giant KBR hired Unaoil to help it secure a joint contract with UK-based Petrofac for Kazakhstan's Kashagan oil field starting in 2004.

Internal electronic correspondence between employees Pentagon of KBR (one of the leading contractors, which until 2007 was a subsidiary) Halliburton and Unaoil shows that KBR has unsuccessfully tried to win projects in this oil field since 1998.

In an email from February 2005, a man named Richard Stuckey with a Halliburton email address wrote to Peter Willimont of Unaoil, telling him to immediately start'communicating' with insiders. 'I believe a good spaghetti house is what it takes, of course, a little kebab for lunch, good for digestion too,' Stuckey wrote. Spaghetti and kebab were code names for the Kashagan-based Italian oil company and Kazakh government officials.

Unaoil completed the assignment. She transferred Leonid Bortolazzo, a consultant to one of the divisions of Kazakhstan's state oil company and a former manager of Italian oil company Eni, to her salary. In exchange for the fact that Bortolazzo leaked corporate documents and sent contracts to Unaoil clients, Unaoil paid him up to $80 thousand a month.

At the same time, Unaoil sought to win favor with other Kazakh government officials. In 2008, the group spent thousands of euros on luxury hotel rooms for top oil executive Kairat Boranbayev and his assistants during their visit to Monaco.

Soon to clear all suspicions about himself, KBR hired Kevin Abikoff from the Washington law firm Hughes Hubbard and Reed to conduct a thorough investigation of KBR's past work with Unaoil. Abikoff wrote a 51-page report on his findings and concluded that working with Unaoil did not pose a risk of violating corruption laws.