QatarEnergy: Coming to an oilfield near you
As a rather bemused globe tries to get its head around the absurdity of holding the World Cup in the wrong place at the wrong time, the sheer venality of Fifa shines through even the most demented rantings of its president, Gianni Infantino.
Qatar may well be wondering why it piled $200bn into infrastructure and $6.5bn into football stadiums only to be pilloried for its human rights record, including the cruel and unusual punishment of making fans last the full 90 minutes without a refreshing beaker of watery Budweiser.
But there’s no denying that QatarEnergy, the company that allowed the tiny country to buy the whole jamboree, is a moneymaking machine. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine kicked off a global energy crisis, demand for Qatari liquefied natural gas has gone through the roof, boosting its oil and gas revenues by two-thirds in the first half of the year to a princely $32bn.
This goes quite a long way when you’ve only got 300,000 citizens, and are doing an excellent job in keeping the ruling Al Thani family in 747s and superyachts.
QatarEnergy has been remarkably efficient over the years at developing and exploiting its domestic gas production, and it is now looking to expand its international portfolio with stakes in exploration projects all over the world.
It is planning to expand its international production from 45,000 barrels a day to 500,000 barrels by 2030. And one of its most promising projects is off the coast of Namibia, where its partners, Shell and Total, have both found oil in the past year.
FTX: A crypto crash long overdue
John Ray III, the veteran insolvency professional who was parachuted in to manage cryptocurrency trading exchange FTX’s bankruptcy, has come across a car crash or two in the course of a career that has included the pile-ups of Enron, Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, but he says FTX is in a league of its own.
Never before has he seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information”, as the company hurtled into what looks like being one of the ugliest bankruptcies in corporate history.
This is more than a little embarrassing for Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who shared the stage with founder Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX’s Crypto Bahamas event in April, not to mention investors such as Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek and of course the ever-generous SoftBank.
FTX’s valuation peaked at an eye-watering $32bn as it positioned itself as a portal between traditional finance and crypto, while its sister company, Alameda Research, operated as some species of hedge fund.
Money appears to have been flying around between the entities and into the pockets of their executives at an alarming rate, with $8bn of customer deposits transferred to Alameda “accidentally”. Corporate funds were used to buy homes and Bankman-Fried himself received a $1bn loan.
The company was being run by a small number of close friends in their late 20s who shared a penthouse in the Bahamas, and were described by Ray as “a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated individuals”. With the benefit of hindsight it seems remarkable they survived for so long.