Peru wiretapping scandal involves Norwegian oil company

Alan Garcia

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Last October, a television station in Peru aired intercepted telephone conversations in which high-level politicians were heard accepting payments by lobbyists in return for awarding state oil contracts to a Discover Petroleum, a small Norwegian oil company. The revelation caused one of the worst crises in modern Peruvian political history, prompting the entire cabinet of President Alan Garcia to resign. Now the country’s Department of Justice is investigating charges of corruption against the president of Discover Petroleum, several lobbyists, numerous government oil executives, and three former government ministers. Meanwhile, the Peruvian police is targeting the people responsible for…intercepting the revelatory telephone calls. Six people were arrested late last week for illegally recording the telephone discussions on behalf of Business Track SAC, a private security company. Interestingly, five of the six are either retired or active counterintelligence officers of the Peruvian Navy. So far, investigators have not revealed who had hired Business Track SAC to wiretap the telephone lines of the oil lobbyists, nor the exact source of the leaked recordings. However, one of the lobbyists under investigation is rumored to have testified that the recordings were purchased from the private security company by Petro-Tech Peruana SA, a Peruvian oil exploration consortium competing with the Norwegians for government contracts. Petro-Tech Peruana has refused to corroborate these rumors, but has actually acknowledged that it did hire Business Track SAC to “audit its computer security systems” in 2006.