Tony Buckingham
Arms dealers
[Anthony Leslie Rowland “Tony” Buckingham is a oil industry executive with a significant share holding in Heritage Oil Corporation. Heritage is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange since 1999. Recently Heritage listed on the London Stock Exchange. Mr Buckingham’s direct and indirect share holding is estimated to represent 33% of Heritage. This share was reduced in November 2007 via a share placement made through JP Morgan and Canaccord. Mr Buckingham is a former partner of the mercenary provider or private military company Executive Outcomes. He has had no involvement with such organizations since 1999 and has focused his time on running Heritage. Tony Buckingham, the current CEO and major shareholder of Heritage, has led the company through major exploration finds, including the hydrocarbon system in Lake Albert, Uganda and the M’Boundi oilfield in the Republic of Congo. This positive track record should continue as a result of the recently awarded licenses in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Mali. http://wtpotusresearchblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/theres-something-about-tony-buckingham-part-2/ ]
[2010] Tony Buckingham, Heritage Oil chief with the mercenary past banks £85million
[2006] Behind the numbers.
Untold Suffering in the Congo By
Keith Harmon
Snow & David Barouski Private
military contractors (PMCs) are also big business in Africa. Brown & Root, a
subsidiary of Halliburton, helped build a military base near Cyangugu, Rwanda
next to the Congo-Rwandan border. “Officially,” Brown and Root was there to
clear landmines, but instead housed mercenaries from Military Professional
Resources Inc. (MPRI) who trained the RPF and Laurent Kabila’s ADFL for the 1996
invasion of the Congo, and the Rwandan army’s re-invasion in 1998, after Laurent
Kabila threw out the Rwandans, Ugandans, Bechtel, and the IMF. The French
intelligence service reported that U.S. Special Forces and mercenaries from MPRI
participated in the murder of Rwandan Hutu refugees on the Oso River near Goma
in 1996 and even claims to have turned over the bodies of two U.S. soldiers
killed in combat near Goma. The circumstances surrounding the unofficial
recovery of these soldiers remain very mysterious.
MPRI is based in Arlington,
Virginia and is staffed by 36 retired U.S. generals. It is contracted by the
Pentagon to fulfill the African Crisis Responsive Initiative (ACRI). This
program includes the Ugandan military and it supplied military training in
guerrilla warfare to Ugandan officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina in July
1996. During the invasion of the Congo in 1998, Ugandan soldiers were found with
ACRI equipment while Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have
implicated Ugandan battalions trained by ACRI in rapes, murders, extortion, and
beatings of Ugandan civilians.
Executive Outcomes founder Tony
Buckingham has established other PMCs around Africa. Buckingham’s Heritage
Oil & Gas works closely with his PMC Sandline International to manipulate the
petroleum options around Lake Albert and is believed to have signed concession
deals with warring armies and governments on both sides of the Uganda-Congo
border. Branch Energy is another Buckingham affiliated company operating in the
Great Lakes region.
Investigations of illegal weapons
sales to Rwanda last year, in violation of the UN arms embargo on the region,
have been hampered by the Rwandan government’s refusal to provide a list of
serial numbers of the 5,000 AK-47s delivered there. The shipping country,
Bulgaria, also refused to provide serial numbers and would only confirm that the
weapons were sold legally to a non-embargo country, Nigeria, en route to Rwanda
and DRC. The governments of Uganda, Congo, South Africa, and Equatorial Guinea—a
major U.S. petroleum protectorate—are equally culpable in supporting the
clandestine arms sales to the region.