Academic

Marsa el-where?

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

An increasing number of British news reports -- such as this one in yesterday's Guardian -- suggest that the roiling Scottish-Libyan kerfuffle over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is best understood as a story about international business in addition to criminal justice.  Such an evolution might make business law professors generally more interested.  For my part, the particular facts are also coming closer to home.

Evidently, a centerpiece involves details regarding how the Anglo-Dutch oil concern, Shell, bested American Exxon for rights to massive natural gas fields in Libya.  The Guardian claims that high-ranking British ministers met with Libyan officials as many as 26 times to win access and control of "one of the world's key energy terminals": Marsa el-Brega.

Marsa el-Brega was "once a tiny fishing village on the most southerly tip of the Mediterranean" but now features a massive liquefied natural gas facility.  Brega, as it happens, was also once my home.  For the best part of my first eight years of life, I lived in a tiny expatriate compound there.  Then came the "line-of-death" US-Libyan brouhaha and we were all evacuated, with Americans banned for about a quarter of a century.  How profoundly odd it is to see one's puny, sand-strewn childhood village loom large in international intrigue.

By the way, if you're ever visiting, we lived at 1169 Cyrene.  (A fairly grandiose address, I confess, since there were only about 300 houses.)

Full post as published by Conglomerate on August 31, 2009 (boomark / email).