By Simon Akam
In March 2016 Britain’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) received a tip-off from the other side of the world. Nick McKenzie, an Australian journalist, was working on a story about Unaoil, a little-known company based in Monaco that provided “industrial solutions to the energy sector”. McKenzie had obtained a cache of emails showing that, for over a decade, these solutions had involved Unaoil paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes on behalf of over two dozen international companies, among them Rolls-Royce. The firms sought to obtain engineering contracts worth billions of dollars to build oil infrastructure in countries including Iraq, Syria, Libya, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait.
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