Oil firms bankroll Azerbaijan’s warring regime with billions in fossil fuel money, 8 November 2023

BP and its project partners have transferred $35 billion-worth of oil and gas production to Azerbaijan’s government since 2020, the year that war broke out in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. The sum is more than four times Azerbaijan’s military spending during this period, as new analysis by Global Witness highlights the ‘dictatorship’s’ economic reliance on the British company’s fossil fuel operations...

BP – Azerbaijan’s largest foreign investor – operates and holds the biggest share of two giant oil and gas extraction projects in the country, which it started developing in the 1990s. BP’s current project partners include Exxon, Equinor and Lukoil...

Azerbaijan’s defence budget was $7.9 billion over the same period, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 2022, Azerbaijan was the world’s eighth biggest military spender as a share of GDP. 

On 19th September 2023, Azerbaijan launched a large-scale military offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, a contested region with Armenia. The attack forced over 100,000 people to flee the territory – almost the entire ethnic Armenian population – and prompted the European Parliament to state this amounted to ethnic cleansing. 

On 20th September, one day after Azerbaijan began pounding Nagorno-Karabakh with heavy artillery fire, BP sent a senior delegation – including chair of the board Helge Lund and former CEO Lord Browne – to Baku to celebrate the 100th anniversary of former President Heydar Aliyev’s birth, and to reaffirm BP’s “commitment to a long-term partnership” with Azerbaijan...  

BP pays a share of its projects’ oil and gas production to the government as a condition of operating in Azerbaijan. In 2022 alone, the government’s share of production was $19.3 billion, more than the country’s entire public spending budget of $17.6 billion that year, according to UNICEF.  

While BP’s oil and gas fields are hundreds of kilometres from Nagorno-Karabakh, the company seems to have few qualms about entering Azerbaijan’s disputed territories. In June 2021, BP signed an agreement with the government to build a 240-megawatt solar farm in Jabrayil, a district within the 2020 war zone which Azerbaijan captured in October that year. 

Speaking in Shush in June 2022, a city in Nagorno-Karabakh that was also seized by Azerbaijan in 2020, BP’s regional president said that Azerbaijan’s “liberated territories” have “some of the country’s best solar and geothermal resources”, which makes them a “perfect opportunity for a fully net zero system.”  

UN guidelines give companies operating in conflict-affected regions a heightened responsibility to demonstrate their commitment to human rights. Yet in September 2023, BP turned down a request to sign a joint letter from global business leaders to Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev, urging him to protect human rights for all people in the conflict zone...  

Responding to a request from Global Witness to comment on its operations in Azerbaijan, BP stated that it supports a peaceful settlement to the conflict, and that it remains committed to operating a safe, reliable, and resilient energy business in the region. BP also said that it has a policy to conduct environmental and social impact assessments, including human rights aspects, for projects in conflict-affected regions...