Memos show oil motive in Iraq war

Government ministers discussed plans to exploit Iraq's oil reserves in the months before Britain took a leading role in invading Iraq, documents have revealed.

The secret papers, obtained by an oil campaigner and published by The Independent, are minutes of meetings between senior oil executives and Labour cabinet members, and highlight for the first time the hollow nature of Western governments' public denials of national self-interest in the decision to invade Iraq.

The documents, which have not been provided to the continuing Chilcot inquiry into Britain's involvement in the Iraq war, appear to contradict statements made by Shell in 2003, just before the invasion, that reports of meetings between the oil giant and Downing Street about Iraqi oil were ''highly inaccurate''.


BP also denied it had any ''strategic interest'' in Iraq, while the then prime minister, Tony Blair, dismissed what he called ''the oil conspiracy theory'' as absurd.

The published papers cover October and November 2002 and show that just five months before the invasion, Baroness Symons, then the British trade minister, told BP that the government believed British energy firms should take a share of Iraq's enormous oil and gas reserves as a reward for Mr Blair's military commitment to US plans for regime change.

The minutes reveal that she also agreed to lobby the Bush administration on behalf of BP because it feared being ''locked out'' of discussions and deals purportedly being thrashed out between the US, France and Russia, and their oil companies.

''Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis,'' one minute, from October 2002, said.

The minister pledged to report back before Christmas on her lobbying campaign.

In November the same year the British Foreign Office invited BP to discuss opportunities posed by ''regime change'', describing Iraq as the big oil prospect and noting that ''BP is desperate to go there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity''.

Another minute quotes Edward Chaplin, the Foreign Office's Middle East director at the time, who noted that Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in Iraq for the sake of their long-term futures, adding that ''we were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq''.

Uncovering the documents, obtained under freedom-of-information laws, was the result of five years' work by an oil campaigner, Greg Muttitt, and show that at least five high-level meetings were held on the topic in late 2002.

Mr Muttitt, whose book Fuel on Fire is published next week, said that before the war the British government went to great lengths to deny any interest in Iraq's oil.

''These documents provide the evidence that gives the lie to those claims.''

Since the invasion the 20-year contracts signed have been described as the biggest in the history of the oil industry, covering half of Iraq's reserves.

The Independent said this stake, representing about 60 billion barrels of oil, was bought up by companies including BP and the China National Petroleum Corporation, whose joint consortium alone stands to make £403 million ($623 million) profit per year from the Rumaila field in southern Iraq.