Export-Import Bank gave $8.5bn to Mexico oil firm despite deadly accidents

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/28/export-import-bank-mexico-pemex-oil-company-loans

Export-Import Bank gave $8.5bn to Mexico oil firm despite deadly accidents

US agency kept financing state-owned Pemex even as more than 190 Pemex workers and contractors have died in fires, explosions and collapses since 2009

Gilda di Carli
Wednesday 28 December 2016 12.30 GMT

Fires, explosions and collapsing offshore rigs have cost the lives of more than 190 workers at facilities run by Mexico’s state-owned oil company since 2009. Yet American taxpayers have backed loans to the company worth more than $8.5bn during the Obama years, through an obscure agency which has quietly spoiled the president’s record on climate change.

Since January 2009, the US Export-Import Bank has signed almost $34bn worth of low-interest loans and guarantees to companies and foreign governments to build, expand and promote fossil fuel projects abroad. However, one company benefited more than any other. The Mexican state-owned oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, has collected more than $8.5bn in taxpayer-backed loans and guarantees from the Ex-Im Bank.

During this period, more than 190 Pemex workers and contractors have died and more than 570 were injured as a result of fires, explosions and offshore rig collapses, according to data compiled by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s Energy and Environmental Reporting Project and Guardian US.

The Mexican oil company has also suffered at least 31 major accidents since 2009 involving fatalities, injuries or environmental destruction and contamination – including a 2013 gas explosion in the company’s Mexico City headquarters that killed 37, a 2015 pipeline leak that contaminated three rivers and polluted the drinking water for half a million people, and a 2013 chemical pipeline leak that caused the evacuation of more than 1,000 people. Yet despite this questionable track record and an injury rate that has consistently surpassed global standards, the Export-Import Bank has provided an average of more than $1bn a year to Pemex in loans and guarantees.
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More than a quarter of all fossil fuel financing by the bank since 2009 has been directed toward Pemex, including a $1.3bn guarantee in 2015 for Pemex to purchase services from Houston-based Diamond Offshore, an offshore rig contractor; and a $1.3bn guarantee in 2013 that was to support the work of San Diego-based Solar Turbines Inc, which builds industrial-size gas turbines and compressors, and the UK-headquartered Noble Corporation, which builds offshore rigs.
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