"LUNDIN: SERIOUS, INTIMATE, SWEDEN'S LONGEST TRIAL SETS UP FOR THE LONG HAUL", 21 Sept 2023

A sparse audience settled in to listen to prosecutors accuse - over 22 days - two big business bosses, in a trial due to end on February 19, 2026. On the seventh day, the prosecutor showed reports in the Stockholm courthouse of population displacement in Sudan, looting, rapes and a litany of violence that occurred after oil giant Lundin arrived in the region.

On this seventh day, in the third week, Swedish judicial authorities published a surgically precise programme for the trial of Ian Lundin and Alexandre Schneiter, the former two heads of Swedish company Lundin Oil charged with complicity in war crimes in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.

Never before has a trial lasted so long in Sweden - two and a half years. Never before have the directors of a company found themselves in the dock on such a charge... And it is now nearly 30 years after the directors of Lundin, renamed Orrön Energy last year, bought the rights to exploit the oil field in "block 5A" -- an area located in what has now become South Sudan...

Lundin's lawyers will have to wait until November 29 to give their version, and Schneiter's until February 20...