Oil billionaire Ian Lundin – former owner of Lundin Oil AB will this week appear in Sweden’s biggest ever criminal prosecution over his alleged involvement in war atrocities in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.
At the time, Lundin Oil – which since then changed name several times and sold most of its business in 2022 asked Khartoum to secure a potential oilfield in what is now South Sudan, in the knowledge that it would mean seizing the area by force.
Sweden launched the probe in 2010 following a report on the company’s activities in Sudan by Dutch non-governmental organisation PAX.
According to the 2021 indictment, the executives were therefore complicit in war crimes that were perpetrated by the Sudanese army and allied militia against civilians.
“What constitutes complicity in a criminal sense is that they made these demands despite understanding or, in any case being indifferent to, the military and the militia carrying out the war in a way that was forbidden according to international humanitarian law,” the prosecution agency said in 2021.
The company at the time denied the allegations, and identified the indicted as former Chairman Ian Lundin and former CEO Alex Schneiter.
Prosecutors in 2021 also filed a claim to confiscate $127 million from the company, corresponding to profits from the sale of the Sudan business in 2003.
Last week prosecutors had increased the claim to 2.4 billion crowns, Orron Energy stated.
Orron Energy ( former Lundin Oil), after selling its oil and gas operations to Norway’s Aker BP in a $14 billion deal said the company will challenge the claim.
Sudan waged war for decades in South Sudan, which became independent in 2011, and elsewhere in the country.
Former president Omar al-Bashir, who ruled between 1989 and 2019, is wanted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for genocide and crimes against humanity, which he denies.
