Name: The Oil Kingmaker
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The Oil Kingmaker

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in London’s Mayfair district are the offices of Park Energy Law, one of the world’s most influential energy law firms. It is from there that the company’s managing partner, James Jay Park, advises private oil and gas companies and, according to his website, “state-owned energy companies/governments on developing their petroleum regimes” in the Middle East and Africa. Governments around the world are increasingly throwing vast resources at the conundrum of acting on climate change while still providing affordable energy to power-hungry consumers. They employ an army of advisers, mandarins and civil servants to guide them. In this complex geopolitical realm, Park’s public persona appears almost uniquely powerful. Park has been described by Who’s Who Legal as the world’s most “influential” energy lawyer and has been called a “kingmaker” for his efforts to shape legal frameworks and policy for billions of dollars of crude oil, much of it still in the ground. Park once quoted Otto von Bismarck at an oil conference in Dubai, saying, “Laws are like sausages: you don’t want to know how they were made, you don’t want to know how the sausage machine works.” For Park, that lack of curiosity is a boon: In a series of apparent conflicts of interest spanning decades and continents, Park has played gourmet chef as well as his own chief customer, choosing the best “pork sausages” for himself and his associates. Most people would recognize this as a conflict of interest, but in some cases it appears Park may have been self-dealing, which is illegal in most jurisdictions.According to his own website, Park claims he has “assisted governments and state oil companies in the design or amendment of petroleum regimes in 20 countries, whose resources comprise 49% of world oil reserves and 33% of world gas reserves.” In Africa alone, Park has advised the African Petroleum Producers Association, whose 18 governments control over 90% of the continent’s oil and gas production.&nbsp;If his own hype is to be believed, Park has been essential in deciding what proportion of oil royalties a government gets and how many billions of barrels of crude a drilling company might acquire, and crucially, for how much.&nbsp;In an interview in 2018 with The Energy Year, Park stated that his law firm did not “act within a country for both the government and investors.” But Park’s own website has stated that he does indeed work with “both investors and states.” Our investigation has uncovered a clear pattern of Park advising governments and then setting up or advising companies in the same country, thereby benefiting directly from the oil regulations he helped draft.Park did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.Our team has found many instances — from Iraq and Somalia, Mexico, Chad, Tunisia and now Namibia — where Park helped governments create laws while advising companies in which he had an interest on how to benefit from those same laws. Some of these scandals have been investigated by the United Nations or government agencies like the Serious Fraud Office in the U.K., and others have resulted in convictions for some of Park’s erstwhile clients. In three countries — Chad, Tunisia and Namibia — companies associated with Park have also reportedly been investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.So who is Park, the oil kingmaker you have never heard of? He may be London-based, but Park is a Canadian, born in Montreal. Oil runs through the family — his father, an ExxonMobil engineer, rose to become vice president of the company’s refinery division. Growing up he had summer jobs working for ExxonMobil’s subsidiary in Canada, Imperial Oil.&nbsp;In 1980, the young lawyer went to work for the Canadian law firm Macleod Dixon, where he would work directly and peripherally in places like Russia for decades, helping that country as it sold off state resources to private firms. Since at least 2013 he has run two companies: Park Energy Law and Petroleum Regimes Advisory Limited. It is through these two companies that he has helped governments draft their own oil laws while also running companies that have directly benefited from those laws.&nbsp;Park is a “King’s Counsel,” one of the highest honors a solicitor can attain in the U.K. It can take up to five years to earn the distinction and is seen as a legal badge of excellence. Despite this distinction, controversy, and sometimes conflict, seem to follow him.As far back as the 1980s, ExxonMobil “considered Iraq a promising place, full of massive, under-exploited oil fields.” Shortly before the 2003 invasion, Chevron talked about “coveting the opportunity” to exploit the vast reserves. The company was not the only player drooling at billions of barrels of oil. So, too, were a number of small Canadian companies. And one lawyer in particular.&nbsp;For Iraq’s nationalized reserves to be exploited by private companies, new laws had to be in place, and that’s where Park stepped in. He would later write a guest column in the Financial Times about how the country’s oil and gas treasures could be exploited by enacting these new laws.&nbsp;The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which controls the semi-autonomous region in Iraq’s northeast, was keen to exploit its share of Iraq’s sizable oil reserves, independent of what the government in Baghdad did. At the time, Kurdistan was seen as one of the last unexplored regions on the globe with the best prospects of discovering vast amounts of new oil. Even today the KRG asserts great control over its oil wealth — often at odds with the central government in Baghdad.Officials from the KRG stated that they would not wait for a federal oil law before signing their own oil contracts. Over several months in 2006 and 2007, the Canadian firm Western Oil Sands, later to become WesternZagros, was in negotiation with the KRG over an Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement (EPSA) license. It would allow foreign companies like WesternZagros to privately develop Iraq’s untapped oil reserves.WesternZagros was a client of Park’s through Macleod Dixon, where he was a senior partner. He was also, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a senior adviser to WesternZagros. Beginning at least as far back as 2006, Park represented and negotiated on behalf of the firm in its bid for the EPSA in Kurdistan.&nbsp;U.S. government documents show that at the time Macleod Dixon was not only working for but also a shareholder in WesternZagros. On its website, WesternZagros claims that by 2020 it had “invested over US$500 million in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.” According to the Independent newspaper, at the time that Park was representing WesternZagros, he was also helping the KRG write the oil law that would govern oil companies like WesternZagros. The newspaper noted that Park “was the author of oil legislation in … Kurdistan and has represented foreign companies and the KRG in contract negotiations.” When the KRG’s oil law was enacted in 2007, Park called it a “milestone.”&nbsp;WesternZagros’ partner was another Canadian company, Talisman, which is also connected to Park’s old law firm in oil-rich Sudan. According to one Canadian paper, together Talisman and WesternZagros led “the industry’s push to start pumping money out of post-Saddam Iraq.”Park would represent WesternZagros for at least four years. He wrote in 2011 for the Financial Times special supplement on Kurdistan oil and gas that he was still working as a lawyer for Macleod Dixon representing WesternZagros in Kurdistan. His bio for the piece states that “Mr Park provides advice and training for oil &amp; gas companies, the federal Ministry of Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government.” He still backed the KRG for having drafted its own law. Park wrote that “petroleum is a matter where the regional governments have authority.”

in London’s Mayfair district are the offices of Park Energy Law, one of the world’s most influential energy law firms. It is from there that the company’s managing partner, James Jay Park, advises private oil and gas companies and, according to his website, “state-owned energy companies/governments on developing their petroleum regimes” in the Middle East and Africa. Governments around the world are increasingly throwing vast resources at the conundrum of acting on climate change while still providing affordable energy to power-hungry consumers. They employ an army of advisers, mandarins...

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The Oil Kingmaker

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