American oil giant ExxonMobil applied for seven separate licenses to be exempted from U.S. sanctions against Russia while Rex Tillerson, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of state, ran the company, according to documents obtained by the Kyiv Post.
The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls, which administers the country’s sanctions regime, approved four of ExxonMobil’s requests to get around sanctions.
The Kyiv Post received a list of companies and individuals that asked for licenses that would allow them to do business otherwise prohibited by sanctions via a Freedom of Information Act request on Jan. 7. The data shows requests through the end of October 2016.
The U.S. and its European allies imposed sanctions on Russia in an attempt to punish it for its war against Ukraine in the hope of deterring further violence. The election of Trump has stoked fears that the sanctions regime could be rolled back.
From the data, it appears that during Tillerson’s tenure as CEO, ExxonMobil got four separate licenses from the U.S. government.
According to ExxonMobil spokesman Scott Silvestri, the company asked for the licenses in relation to a drilling exploration project into the Kara Sea’s universitetskaya-1 oil field.
Silvestri said that the U.S. authorities granted the licenses to “complete the drilling and conduct orderly wind down operations” for the exploration well.
ExxonMobil had been plumbing the oil field in conjunction with Rosneft since April 2011 in a deal to explore oil reserves beneath the Kara Sea, north of Siberia. According to a September 2014 press release, issued just after Quartz reported that the U.S. government granted ExxonMobil sanctions relief, Rosneft estimated that exploration of the universitetskaya-1 oil well had unearthed 100 million tonnes of oil.
Tillerson’s past contacts with Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin have drawn scrutiny on Capitol Hill as the U.S. Senate mulls over whether to confirm the former ExxonMobil chairman to become the United States’s top diplomat. Some officials, including Florida Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, have questioned whether ExxonMobil’s massive business interests in Russia would affect Tillerson’s management of U.S. foreign policy.
The sanctions license data sheet shows that ExxonMobil first received a license for the joint project in 2014. The most recent license appears to have been updated in October 2016, according to the data, suggesting ExxonMobil is continuing activity at either the Kara Sea well or in another, unspecified venture.
Both ExxonMobil Corporation, the conglomerate’s parent, and ExxonMobil Russia, the company’s Russia division, applied for and received licenses.
The U.S. Treasury allows companies and individuals to request licenses that allow transactions which would have otherwise been prohibited under sanctions to go forward.
