By ALEX PERRY in Paris

^{Illustrations by Julius Maxim for POLITICO}

_{This article is also available in French}

When Patrick Pouyanné decided to spend billions on a giant natural gas field in a faraway warzone, he made the call alone, over a single dinner, with the head of a rival energy company.

Pouyanné, the chairman and CEO of what was then called Total, was dining with Vicki Hollub, CEO of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum. It was late April 2019, and Hollub was in a David and Goliath battle with the American energy behemoth Chevron to buy Anadarko, like Occidental a mid-sized Texan oil and gas explorer.

The American investor Warren Buffett was set to back Hollub with $10 billion, but it wasn’t enough. So Hollub flew to Paris to meet Pouyanné.

Hollub’s proposal: Pouyanné would pitch in $8.8 billion in exchange for Anadarko’s four African gas fields, including a vast deep-sea reserve off northern Mozambique, an area in the grip of an Islamist insurgency.

The Frenchman, who had previously approached Anadarko about the same assets, said yes in a matter of minutes.

“What are the strengths of Total?” Pouyanné explained to an Atlantic Council event in Washington a few weeks later. “LNG,” he went on, and the “Middle East and Africa,” regions where the company has operated since its origin in the colonial era. “So it’s just fitting exactly and perfectly.”

Total, “a large corporation,” could be “so agile,” he said, because of the efficacy of his decision-making, and the clarity of his vision to shift from oil to lower-emission gas, extracted from lightly regulated foreign lands.

In the end, “it [was] just a matter of sending an email to my colleague [Hollub],” he added. “This is the way to make good deals.”

Six years later, it’s fair to ask if Pouyanné was a little hasty.

On Nov. 17, a European human rights NGO filed a criminal complaint with the national counterterrorism prosecutor’s office in Paris accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearances, all in northern Mozambique.

The allegations turn on a massacre, first reported by POLITICO last year, in which Mozambican soldiers crammed about 200 men into shipping containers at the gatehouse of a massive gas liquefaction plant TotalEnergies is building in the country, then killed most of them over the next three months.

The complaint, submitted by the nonprofit European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), alleges that TotalEnergies became an accomplice in the “so-called ‘container massacre’” because it “directly financed and materially supported” the Mozambican soldiers who carried out the executions, which took place between June and September 2021.

“TotalEnergies knew that the Mozambican armed forces had been accused of systematic human rights violations, yet continued to support them with the only objective to secure its facility,” said Clara Gonzales, co-director of the business and human rights program at ECCHR, a Berlin-based group specializing in international law that has spent the past year corroborating the atrocity.

In response to the complaint, a company spokesperson in Paris said in a written statement: “TotalEnergies takes these allegations very seriously” and would “comply with the lawful investigation prerogatives of the French authorities.”

Last year, in response to questions by POLITICO, the company — through its subsidiary Mozambique LNG — said it had no knowledge of the container killings, adding that its “extensive research” had “not identified any information nor evidence that would corroborate the allegations of severe abuses and torture.”

This week, the spokesperson repeated that position.

Asked in May in the French National Assembly about the killings, Pouyanné dismissed “these false allegations” and demanded the company’s accusers “put their evidence on the table.” Questioned about the complaint on French television this week, he again rejected the allegations and described them as a “smear campaign” motivated by the fact that TotalEnergies produces fossil fuels.

The war crimes complaint is based on POLITICO’s reporting and other open-source evidence. In the last year, the container killings have been confirmed by the French newspaper Le Monde and the British journalism nonprofit Source Material. The British Mozambique expert Professor Joseph Hanlon also said the atrocity was “well known locally,” and an investigation carried out by UK Export Finance (UKEF) — the British state lender, which is currently weighing delivery of a $1.15 billion loan to Total’s project — has heard evidence from its survivors. 

The massacre was an apparent reprisal for a devastating attack three months earlier by ISIS-affiliated rebels on the nearby town of Palma, just south of the border with Tanzania, which killed 1,354 civilians, including 55 of Total’s workforce, according to a house-to-house survey carried out by POLITICO. Of those ISIS murdered, it beheaded 330. TotalEnergies has previously noted that Mozambique has yet to issue an official toll for the Palma massacre.

In March, a French magistrate began investigating TotalEnergies for involuntary manslaughter over allegations that it abandoned its contractors to the onslaught. 

After the jihadis left the area in late June, Mozambican commandos based at Total’s gas concession rounded up 500 villagers and accused them of backing the rebels. They separated men from women and children, raped several of the women, then forced the 180-250 men into two metal windowless shipping containers that formed a rudimentary fortified entrance to Total’s plant.

There, the soldiers kept their prisoners in 30-degree-Celsius heat for three months. According to eleven survivors and two witnesses, some men suffocated. Fed handfuls of rice and bottle caps of water, others starved or died of thirst. The soldiers beat and tortured many of the rest. Finally, they began taking them away in groups and executing them.

Only 26 men survived, saved when a Rwandan intervention force, deployed to fight ISIS, discovered the operation. A second house-to-house survey conducted by POLITICO later identified by name 97 of those killed or disappeared.

Along with the new ECCHR complaint and the British inquiry, the killings are the subject of three other separate investigations: by the Mozambican Attorney General, the Mozambican National Human Rights Commission, and the Dutch government, which is probing $1.2 billion in Dutch state financing for TotalEnergies’ project.

This week’s complaint was lodged with the offices of the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor, whose remit includes war crimes. The prosecutor will decide whether to open a formal inquiry and appoint an investigating magistrate. 

Should the case move ahead, TotalEnergies will face the prospect of a war crimes trial. 

Such an eventuality would represent a spectacular fall from grace for a business that once held a central place in French national identity and a CEO whose hard-nosed resolve made him an icon of global business.

Should a French court eventually find the company or its executives liable in the container killings, the penalties could include fines and, possibly, jail terms for anybody indicted.

How did TotalEnergies get here? How did Patrick Pouyanné?

‘Pouyanné Petroleum’

Born in Normandy in 1963, the son of a provincial customs official and a post office worker, Pouyanné elevated himself to the French elite by winning selection to the École Polytechnique, the country’s foremost engineering university, and then the École des Mines, where France’s future captains of industry are made.

Following a few years in politics as a minister’s aide, he joined the French state petroleum company Elf as an exploration manager in Angola in 1996. After moving to Qatar in 1999 as Elf merged with Total, Pouyanné ascended to the top job at Total in 2014 after his predecessor, Christophe de Margerie, was killed in a plane crash in Moscow.

Pouyanné led by reason, and force of will. “To be number one in a group like Total … is to find yourself alone,” he said in 2020. “When I say ‘I don’t agree,’ sometimes the walls shake. I realize this.”

A decade at the top has seen Pouyanné, 62, transform a company of 100,000 employees in 130 countries into a one-man show — “Pouyanné Petroleum,” as the industry quip goes.

His frequent public appearances, and his unapologetically firm hand, have made him a celebrated figure in international business.

“Patrick Pouyanné has done an extraordinary job leading TotalEnergies in a complex environment, delivering outstanding financial results and engaging the company in the energy transition quicker and stronger than its peers,” Jacques Aschenbroich, the company’s lead independent director, said in 2023.

Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega, director of energy and climate at the French Institute of International Relations, agreed. “His involvement is his strength,” he said. “He’s able to take a decision quickly, in a much more agile and rapid way.”

Still, Eyl-Mazzega said, “I’m not sure everyone is happy to work with him. You have to keep up the pace. There are often departures. He’s quite direct and frank.” 

Among employees, Pouyanné’s lumbering frame and overbearing manner has earned him a nickname: The Bulldozer.

The moniker isn’t always affectionate. A former Total executive who dealt regularly with him recalled him as unpleasantly aggressive, “banging fists on the table.”

The effect, the executive said, has been to disempower the staff: “The structure of Total is trying to guess what Pouyanné wants to do. You can’t make any decisions unless it goes to the CEO.”

In a statement to POLITICO, TotalEnergies called such depictions “misplaced and baseless.”

‘Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground’

What’s not in dispute is how Pouyanné has used his authority to shape Total’s answer to the big 21st-century oil and gas puzzle: how to square demand for fossil fuels with simultaneous demands from politicians and climate campaigners to eliminate them.

His response has been diversification, moving the company away from high-emission fuels towards becoming a broad-based, ethical energy supplier, centered on low-carbon gas, solar and wind, and pledging to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The change was symbolized by Pouyanné’s renaming of the company TotalEnergies in 2021.

A second, more unsung element of Pouyanné’s strategy has been moving much of his remaining fossil fuel operation beyond Western regulation. 

Speaking to an audience at Chatham House in London in 2017, he said the catalyst for his move to favor reserves in poorer, less tightly policed parts of the planet was the penalties imposed on the British energy giant BP in the United States following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, in which 11 men died and an oil slick devastated the Gulf of Mexico coast.

Pouyanné declared that the fines — between $62 billion and $142 billion, depending on the calculation used — represented an excessive “legal risk” to oil and gas development in the West.

While other, more troubled territories came with their share of dangers, Pouyanné put the cost of failure of any project outside the West at a more manageable $2 to $3 billion, according to his Chatham House remarks.

As a way of assessing risk, it was efficient.

“Other players would spend a lot of money on consultancies and write 70 reports to conclude that a project is risky,” Eyl-Mazzega said. “Pouyanné, on the other hand, is prepared to take risks.”

Asked by the French Senate in 2024 how he chose where to invest, however, Pouyanné admitted that his math was strictly about the bottom line.

“Don’t ask us to take the moral high ground,” he said.

‘A collapse will not put Total in danger’

The first oil and gas prospectors arrived in northern Mozambique in 2006 as part of a Western effort to broaden supply beyond the Middle East. When Anadarko found gas 25 miles out to sea in 2010, the talk was of Mozambique as the new Qatar.

At 2.6 million acres, or about a third of the size of Belgium, Rovuma Basin Area 1 was a monster, thought to hold 75 trillion cubic feet of gas, or 1 percent of all global reserves. An adjacent field, Area 4, quickly snapped up by ExxonMobil, was thought to hold even more.

To cope with the volume of production, Anadarko’s Area 1 consortium drew up a plan for a $20 billion onshore liquefaction plant. Together with ExxonMobil’s field, the cost of developing Mozambique’s gas was estimated at $50 billion, which would make it the biggest private investment ever made in Africa.

But in 2017, an ISIS insurgency emerged to threaten those ambitions. 

By the time Pouyanné was preparing to buy Anadarko’s 26.5 percent share in Area 1 two years later, what had begun as a ragtag revolt against government corruption in the northern province of Cabo Delgado had become a full-scale Islamist rebellion. 

Insurgents were taking ever more territory, displacing hundreds of thousands of people and regularly staging mass beheadings.

Even under construction, the gas plant was a regular target. It was run by Europeans and Americans, intending to make money for companies thousands of miles away while displacing 2,733 villagers to build their concession and banning fishermen from waters around their drill sites. After several attacks on plant traffic to and from the facility, in February 2019, the militants killed two project workers in a village attack and dismembered a contract driver in the road. 

A further risk had its origins in a ban on foreigners carrying guns. That made the plant reliant for security on the Mozambican army and police, both of which had a well-documented record of criminality and repression.

Initially, Pouyanné seemed unconcerned. The gas field was outside international law, as Mozambique had not ratified the Rome Statute setting up the International Criminal Court. And Pouyanné appeared to see the pursuit of high-risk, high-reward projects almost as an obligation for a deep-pocketed corporation, telling the Atlantic Council in May 2019, soon after he agreed the Mozambique deal, that Total was so big, it didn’t need to care — at least, not in the way of other, lesser companies or countries.

“We love risk, so we have decided to embark on the Mozambique story,” he said. “Even if there is a collapse, [it] will [not] put Total in danger.”

In September 2019, when Total’s purchase was formally completed, the company declared in a press release: “The Mozambique LNG project is largely derisked.”

In one of several statements to POLITICO, TotalEnergies explained the term echoed the boss’s focus on “the project’s commercial and financial fundamentals. To infer this was a dismissal of security concerns amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the sector operates.”

Still, for workers at the project, it was an arresting statement, given that a Mozambique LNG worker had recently been chopped to pieces.

Around the same time, the project managers at Anadarko, many of whom were now working for Total, tried to warn their new CEO of the danger posed by the insurgency.

It was when they met Pouyanné, however, that “things then all started to unwind,” said one.

Pouyanné regaled the team who had worked on the Mozambique project for years with a speech “on how brilliant Total was, and how brilliantly Total was going to run this project,” a second executive added.

Pouyanné added he had “a French hero” running the company’s security: Denis Favier who, as a police commander, led a team of police commandos as they stormed a hijacked plane on the tarmac at Marseille in 1994, and in 2015, as France’s most senior policeman, commanded the operation to hunt and kill the Islamist brothers who shot dead 12 staff at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris.

“This is easy for him,” Pouyanné said.

Asked about the transition from Anadarko to Total, the company maintained it was responsive to all concerns expressed by former Anadarko workers. “We are not aware of any such dismissal of security concerns by TotalEnergies or its senior management,” the company said. “It is incorrect to state that advice from the ground was not listened to.”

Still, after meeting Pouyanné, the old Anadarko team called their Mozambique staff together to brief them on their new boss.

“Well, holy shit,” one manager began, according to a person present. “We’ve got a problem.”

‘Very vulnerable’

A third former Anadarko staffer who stayed on to work for Total said that on taking over, the company also put on hold a decision to move most contractors and staff from hotels and compounds in Palma to inside its fortified camp — a costly move that Anadarko was planning in response to deteriorating security.

“This was a danger I had worked so hard to eliminate,” the staffer said. “Palma was very vulnerable. Almost nobody was supposed to be [there]. But Total wouldn’t listen to me.”

Other measures, such as grouping traffic to and from the plant in convoys and flanking them with drones, also ended. One project contractor who regularly made the run through rebel territory described the difference between Anadarko and Total as “night and day.”

Then in June 2020, the rebels captured Mocimboa da Praia, the regional hub, and killed at least eight subcontractors. In late December that year, they staged another advance that brought them to Total’s gates.

At that, Pouyanné reversed course and assumed personal oversight of the security operation, the first Anadarko manager said. Despite no expertise in security, “[he] had to get into every little last possible detail.”

The second executive concurred. “It went from, ‘I don’t care, we’ve got the best security people in the business to run this’ to ‘Oh my God, this is a disaster, let me micromanage it and control it,’” he said.

The company was “not aware of any … criticism that Mr. Pouyanné lacks the necessary expertise,” TotalEnergies said, adding the CEO had “first-hand experience of emergency evacuation … [from] when Total had to evacuate its staff from Yemen in 2015.”

The insurgents’ advance prompted Pouyanné to order the evacuation of all TotalEnergies staff. By contrast, many contractors and subcontractors, some of them behind schedule because of Covid, were told to keep working, according to email exchanges among contractors seen by POLITICO.

“Mozambique LNG did not differentiate between its own employees, its contractors or subcontractors when giving these instructions,” the company said, but added that it was not responsible for the decisions of its contractors.

Then, in February 2021, Pouyanné flew to Maputo, the Mozambican capital, to negotiate a new security deal with then Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi.

Afterward, the two men announced the creation of the Joint Task Force, a 1,000-man unit of soldiers and armed police to be stationed inside the compound. 

The deal envisaged that the new force would protect a 25-kilometer radius around the gas plant, including Palma and several villages. In practice, by concentrating so many soldiers and police inside the wire, it left Palma comparatively exposed.

“It is incorrect to allege that Palma was left poorly defended,” the company said. “However, it is a fact that these security forces were overwhelmed by the magnitude and violence of the terrorist attacks in March 2021.” TotalEnergies added it is not correct to say that “Mr. Pouyanné personally managed the security deal setting up the Joint Task Force.”

‘Train wreck’

By this time, the company’s own human rights advisers were warning that by helping to create the Joint Task Force — to which the company agreed to pay what it described as “hardship payments” via a third party, as well as to equip it and accommodate it on its compound — Pouyanné was effectively making TotalEnergies a party to the conflict, and implicating it in any human rights abuses the soldiers carried out.

Just as worrying was TotalEnergies’ insistence — according to a plant security manager, and confirmed by minutes of a Total presentation on security released under a Dutch freedom of information request — that all major security decisions be handled by a 20-man security team 5,000 miles away in Paris.

That centralization seemed to help explain how, when the Islamists finally descended on Palma on March 24, 2021, Total was among the last to know.

One Western security contractor told POLITICO he had pulled his people out 10 days before the assault, based on intelligence he had on guns and young men being pre-positioned in town.

In the days immediately preceding the attack, villagers around Palma warned friends and relatives in town that they had seen the Islamists advancing. WhatsApp messages seen by POLITICO indicate contractors reported the same advance to plant security on March 22 and March 23.

Nonetheless, at 9 a.m. on March 24, TotalEnergies in Paris announced that it was safe for its staff to return.

Hours later, the Islamists attacked.

“Neither Mozambique LNG nor TotalEnergies received any specific ‘advance warnings’ of an impending attack prior to March 24,” the company said.

Faced with a three-pronged advance by several hundred militants, the plant security manager said TotalEnergies’ hierarchical management pyramid was unable to cope.

Ground staff could not respond to evolving events, paralyzed by the need to seek approval for decisions from Paris.

Total’s country office in Maputo was also in limbo, according to the security manager, neither able to follow what was happening in real-time, nor authorized to respond. 

‘Who can help us?!’

Two decisions, taken as the attack unfolded, compounded the havoc wreaked by the Islamists.

The first was Total’s refusal to supply aviation fuel to the Dyck Advisory Group (DAG), a small, South African private military contractor working with the Mozambican police.

With the police and army overrun, DAG’s small helicopters represented the only functional military force in Palma and the only unit undertaking humanitarian rescues.

But DAG’s choppers were limited by low supplies of jet fuel, forcing them to fly an hour away to refuel, and to ground their fleet intermittently.

Total, as one of the world’s biggest makers of aviation fuel, with ample stocks at the gas plant, was in a position to help. But when DAG asked Total in Paris for assistance, it refused. “Word came down from the mountain,” DAG executive Max Dyck said, “and that was the way it was going to be.”

Total has conceded that it refused fuel to DAG — out of concern for the rescuers’ human rights record, the company said — but made fuel available to the Mozambican security services. DAG later hired an independent lawyer to investigate its record, who exonerated the company.

A second problematic order was an edict, handed down by Pouyanné’s executives in Paris in the months before the massacre, according to the plant security manager, that should the rebels attack, gate security guards at the gas plant were to let no one in.

It was an instruction that could only have been drawn up by someone ignorant of the area’s geography, the man said. 

If the Islamists blocked the three roads in and out of Palma, as conventional tactics would prescribe, the only remaining ways out for the population of 60,000 would be by sea or air — both routes that went through TotalEnergies’s facility, with its port and airport. By barring the civilians’ way, the company would be exposing them.

So it proved. TotalEnergies soon had 25,000 fleeing civilians at its gates, according to an internal company report obtained under a freedom of information request by an Italian NGO, Recommon. Among the crowd were hundreds of project subcontractors and workers.

Witnesses described to POLITICO how families begged TotalEnergies’ guards to let them in. Mothers were passing their babies forward to be laid in front of the gates. But TotalEnergies in Paris refused to allow its guards on the ground to open up.

On March 28, the fifth day of the attack, Paris authorized a ferry to evacuate 1,250 staff and workers from the gas plant, and make a single return trip to pick up 1,250 civilians, who had sneaked inside the perimeter. That still left tens of thousands stranded at its gates.

On March 29, a TotalEnergies community relations manager in Paris made a panicked call to Caroline Brodeur, a contact at Oxfam America.

“He’s like, ‘There’s this huge security situation in Mozambique!’” Brodeur said. “An escalation of violence! We will need to evacuate people! Who can help us? Which NGO can support us with logistics?’”

Thirty minutes later, the man called back. “Wait,” he told Brodeur. “Don’t do anything.” TotalEnergies’ senior managers had overruled him, the man said. No outsiders were to be involved.

“I think he was trying to do the right thing,” Brodeur said in an interview with POLITICO. “But after that, Total went silent.”

Over the next two months, the jihadis killed hundreds of civilians in and around Palma and the gas plant before the Rwandan intervention force pushed them out.

The second former Anadarko and Total executive said the rebels might have attacked Palma, whoever was in charge at the gas project. But Total’s distant, centralized management made a “train wreck … inevitable.”

TotalEnergies said its response to the attack “mitigated as much as was reasonably possible the consequences.” Confirming the phone call to Oxfam, it added: “There was no effort by whoever within TotalEnergies to shut any possibility for external assistance down.”

The company was especially adamant that Pouyanné was not at fault. 

“The allegation that Mr. Pouyanné’s management of TotalEnergies exacerbated the devastation caused by the attacks in Mozambique is entirely unsubstantiated,” it said. “Mr. Pouyanné takes the safety and security of the staff extremely seriously.”

In his television appearance this week, Pouyanné defended the company’s performance. “We completely evacuated the site,” he said. “We were not present at that time.”

He said he considered that TotalEnergies, whose security teams had helped “more than 2,000 civilians evacuate the area,” “had carried out heroic actions.”

‘An almost perfect dinner party’ 

TotalEnergies’ troubles in Mozambique have come amid a wider slump in the country’s fortunes and reputation.

Years of climate protests outside the company’s annual general meetings in central Paris peaked in 2023 when police dispersed activists with batons and tear gas. For the last two years, TotalEnergies has retreated behind a line of security checks and riot police at its offices in Défense, in the western part of Paris.

Though the company intended 2024, its centenary year, as a celebration, the company succeeded mostly in looking past its prime. When Pouyanné took over in 2014, Total was France’s biggest company, and 37th in the world. Today, it is France’s seventh largest and not even in the global top 100. 

Several French media houses chose the occasion of TotalEnergies’ 100th birthday to declare open season on the company, portraying it as a serial offender on pollution, corruption, worker safety, and climate change.

Pouyanné has also presided over a rift with the French establishment. Last year, when he suggested listing in New York to boost the stock, French President Emmanuel Macron berated him in public.

The division grew wider a few weeks later when the French Senate concluded a six-month inquiry into the company with a recommendation that the formerly state-owned enterprise be partly taken back into public ownership. 

The company has faced five separate lawsuits, civil and criminal, claiming it is breaking French law on climate protection and corporate conduct. 

In a sixth case, brought by environmentalists in Paris last month, a judge ordered TotalEnergies to remove advertising from its website claiming it was part of the solution to climate change. Given the company’s ongoing investments in fossil fuels, that was misleading, the judge said, decreeing that TotalEnergies take down its messaging and upload the court’s ruling instead.

The Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has also led protests against TotalEnergies’ East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. That project, intended to pump oil 1,000 miles from Uganda across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean, is similarly embroiled in accusations of human rights abuses, drawing criticism from the European Parliament plus 28 banks and 29 insurance companies who have refused to finance it.

Pouyanné has also taken hits to his personal brand. A low point came in 2022 when he chose the moment his countrymen were recovering from Covid and struggling with soaring fuel prices to defend his salary of €5,944,129 a year.

He was “tired” of the accusation that he had received a 52 percent rise, he wrote on Twitter. His pay, he added, had merely been restored to pre-pandemic levels. 

Overnight, the CEO became the unacceptable face of French capitalism. “Pouyanné lives in another galaxy, far, far away,” said one TV host. Under a picture of the CEO, an MP from the leftist France Unbowed movement wrote: “A name, a face. The obstacle in the way of a nation.”

So heated and widely held is the contempt that in 2023 the company produced a guide for its French employees on how to handle it. Titled “An Almost Perfect Dinner Party,” the booklet lays out arguments and data that staff might use to defend themselves at social occasions.

“Have you ever been questioned, during a dinner with family or friends, about a controversy concerning the Company?” it asked. “Did you have the factual elements to answer your guests?”

‘False allegations’

The war crimes case lodged this week against TotalEnergies was filed in France, despite the alleged crimes occurring in Mozambique, because, it argues, TotalEnergies’ nationality establishes jurisdiction. 

The case represents a dramatic example of the extension of international justice — the prosecution in one country of crimes committed in another. A movement forged in Nuremberg and Tokyo in the wake of World War II, the principles of international justice have been used more recently by national and international courts to bring warlords and dictators to trial — and by national courts to prosecute citizens or companies implicated in abuses abroad where local justice systems are weak.

U.S. courts have ordered ExxonMobil and banana giant Chiquita to stand trial for complicity in atrocities committed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by soldiers or militias paid to protect their premises in Indonesia and Colombia, respectively.

Exxon settled a week before the case opened in 2023. A Florida court ordered Chiquita to pay $38 million to the families of eight murdered Colombian men in June 2024; Chiquita’s appeal was denied that October. 

In Sweden, two executives from Lundin Oil are currently on trial for complicity in war crimes after Sudanese troops and government militias killed an estimated 12,000 people between 1999 and 2003 as they cleared the area around a company drill site. The executives deny the accusations against them.

ECCHR has initiated several international justice cases. Most notably, in 2016, it and another legal non-profit, Sherpa, filed a criminal complaint in Paris against the French cement maker Lafarge, accusing its Syrian plant of paying millions of dollars in protection money to ISIS. Earlier this month, Lafarge and eight executives went on trial in Paris, accused of funding terrorism and breaking international sanctions — charges they deny.

The war crimes complaint against TotalEnergies cites internal documents, obtained under freedom of information requests in Italy and the Netherlands, that show staff at the site knew the soldiers routinely committed human rights abuses against civilians while working for the company. 

There were “regular community allegations of JTF [Joint Task Force] human rights violations,” read one, including “physical violence, and arrests/disappearances.” The report also referred to “troops who were allegedly involved in a [human rights] case in August [2021].” These were deemed so serious that TotalEnergies suspended pay to all 1,000 Joint Task Force soldiers and the army expelled 200 from the region, according to the internal document.

The ECCHR complaint accuses TotalEnergies and “X”, a designation leaving open the possibility for the names of unspecified company executives to be added. Among those named in the document’s 56 pages are Pouyanné and five other TotalEnergies executives and employees. Favier, the company’s security chief, is not among them.

TotalEnergies declined to make any of its executives or security managers available for interviews.

In April 2024, when Pouyanné was questioned about his company’s Mozambique operation by the French Senate, he stated that while the government was responsible for the security of Cabo Delgado, “I can ensure the security of whichever industrial premises on which I might operate.”

Asked about the container executions before the National Assembly this May, Pouyanné reaffirmed his faith in the Mozambican state, saying: “I think we help these countries progress if we trust their institutions and don’t spend our time lecturing them.”

Apparently forgetting how he helped negotiate a security deal to place Mozambican soldiers on Total’s premises, however, he then qualified this statement, saying: “I can confirm that TotalEnergies has nothing to do with the Mozambican army.”

A company spokesperson clarified this week: “TotalEnergies is not involved in the operations, command or conduct of the Mozambican armed forces.”

In addition to the war crimes complaint, TotalEnergies’ Mozambique operation is already the subject of a criminal investigation opened in March by French state prosecutors. The allegation against the company is that it committed involuntary manslaughter by failing to protect or rescue workers left in Palma when ISIS carried out its massacre.

Though POLITICO’s previous reporting found that 55 project workers were killed, TotalEnergies — through its subsidiary, Mozambique LNG — initially claimed it lost no one. “All the employees of Mozambique LNG, its contractors and subcontractors were safely evacuated from the Mozambique LNG Project site,” Maxime Rabilloud, Mozambique LNG’s managing director, told POLITICO last year.

That assertion notwithstanding, the death of at least one British subcontractor, Philip Mawer, is the subject of a formal inquest in the U.K. 

In December 2024, the company’s Paris press office adjusted its position on the Palma attack. “TotalEnergies has never denied the tragedy that occurred in Palma and has always acknowledged the tragic loss of civilian lives,” it told POLITICO. For the first time, it also admitted “a small number” of project workers had been stationed outside its secure compound during the attack and exposed to the bloodbath. 

A resolution to the French manslaughter investigation will take years. A decision on whether to open a formal investigation into the new claims against TotalEnergies for complicity in war crimes, let alone to bring the case to trial, is not expected until 2026, at the earliest.

Should anyone eventually be tried for involuntary manslaughter, a conviction would carry a penalty of three years in prison and a €45,000 fine in France, escalating to five years and €75,000 for “a manifestly deliberate violation of a particular obligation of prudence or safety.”

For complicity in war crimes, the sentence is five years to life.

‘Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?’

The war crimes accusation adds new uncertainty to the 20-year effort to develop Mozambique’s gas fields.

In the aftermath of the 2021 Palma massacre, TotalEnergies declared a state of “force majeure,” a legal measure suspending all contracted work due to exceptional events.

The following four and a half years of shutdown have cost TotalEnergies $4.5 billion, in addition to the $3.9 billion that Pouyanné originally paid Anadarko for the Mozambique operation. Billions more in costs can be expected before the plant finally pumps gas, which Total now predicts will happen in 2029.

The manslaughter case and the war crimes complaint have the potential to cause further holdups by triggering due diligence obligations from TotalEnergies’ lenders, preventing them from delivering loans of $14.9 billion — without which Pouyanné has said his star project will collapse.

Total also faces a Friends of the Earth legal challenge to a $4.7 billion U.S. government loan to the project.

A TotalEnergies spokesperson said this week that the project was able to “meet due diligence requirements by lenders.”

All this comes as the situation on the ground remains unstable. After a successful Rwandan counter-attack from 2021 to 2023, the insurgency has returned, with the Islamists staging raids across Cabo Delgado, including Palma and the regional hub of Mocimboa da Praia.

The International Organization for Migration says 112,185 people fled the violence between September 22 and October 13. Among those killed in the last few months were two gas project workers — a caterer, murdered in Palma, and a security guard, beheaded in a village south of town.

TotalEnergies has consistently said that neither recent legal developments nor the upsurge in ISIS attacks will affect its plans to formally reopen its Mozambique operation by the end of the year.

“This new complaint has no connection with the advancement of the Mozambique LNG project,” a spokesperson said this week.

Pouyanné himself has spent much of this year insisting the project is “back on track” and its financing in place. In October, in a move to restart the project, the company lifted the force majeure. 

Still, in a letter seen by POLITICO, Pouyanné also wrote to Mozambican President Daniel Chapo asking for 10 more years on its drilling license and $4.5 billion from the country to cover its cost overruns. 

Mozambique, whose 2024 GDP was $22.42 billion — around a tenth of TotalEnergies’ revenues for the year of $195.61 billion — has yet to respond.

A final issue for TotalEnergies’ CEO is whether a formal accusation of war crimes will fuel opposition to his leadership among shareholders.

At 2024’s annual general meeting, a fifth of stockholders rejected the company’s climate transition strategy as too slow, and a quarter declined to support Pouyanné for a fourth three-year term. In 2025, several institutional investors expressed their opposition to Pouyanné by voting against his remuneration.

In the statement, the TotalEnergies spokesperson pointed to the 2023 comments by Aschenbroich, the independent board member: “The Board unanimously looks forward to his continued leadership and his strategic vision to continue TotalEnergies’ transition.”

Yet, there seems little prospect that his popularity will improve, inside or outside the company. “Patrick Pouyanné is everyone’s best enemy,” says Olivier Gantois, president of the French oil and gas lobby group UFIP-EM, “the scapegoat we love to beat up on.”

Recently, the 62-year-old Pouyanné has begun to sound uncharacteristically plaintive. At TotalEnergies’ 2022 shareholder meeting, he grumbled that the dissidents might not like CO2 emissions, “but they sure like dividends.”

At last year’s, he complained that TotalEnergies was in an impossible position. “We are trying to find a balance between today’s life and tomorrow’s,” he said. “It’s not because TotalEnergies stops producing hydrocarbons that demand for them will disappear.”

TotalEnergies’ articles of association require Pouyanné to retire before he reaches 67, in 2030, around the time that TotalEnergies currently forecasts gas production to begin in Mozambique.

Henri Thulliez, the lawyer who filed both criminal complaints against TotalEnergies in Paris, predicts Pouyanné’s successors will be less attached to the project — for the simple reason that Mozambique turned out to be bad business.

“You invest billions in the project, and the project has been completely suspended for four years now,” Thulliez says. “All your funders are hesitating. You’re facing two potential litigations in France, maybe at some point elsewhere, too. You have to ask: what’s the point of all of this?”

As for Pouyanné, two questions will haunt his final years at TotalEnergies, he suggests.

First, “Can shareholders afford to keep you in your job?”

Second, “Can you actually look at yourself in the mirror?”

Aude Le Gentil and Alexandre Léchenet contributed to this report.