Tony Buckingham
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Anthony Leslie Rowland "Tony" Buckingham is an oil industry executive with a corporate empire including mineral and mining concessions, and links to mercenary organisations such as Executive Outcomes, which are now known as private military contractors (PMCs).
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[edit] Oil background
Tony Buckingham, a former oil industry diver in the North Sea, founded the Canada-based Heritage Oil Corporation in the early 1990s, where he is the senior Director. Heritage Oil has exploration/drilling concessions in the Albertine Rift – potentially the most productive source of oil in Africa – and operates in Angola, Congo-Brazzaville, Congo-Kinshasa (31000 km²), Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Russia and Sudan.
[edit] Corporate empire
Buckingham's corporate empire embraces:
- Branch Energy which owns diamond concessions in Angola and Sierra Leone
- Indigo Sky Gems, owned jointly with English businessman Russell Hay, has exclusive prospecting rights to dig for semi-precious tourmaline gems in Namibia
- Sandline International, a PMC that came to public attention in the 1990s, failed in its bid to seize control of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville but succeeded in overthrowing the military regime in Sierra Leone which had deposed the democratically-elected President Kabbah
- Executive Outcomes (EO), the South Africa-based PMC with close links to Sandline, fought in Angola in 1993 to recover oil storage facilities owned by Heritage Oil. Elsewhere, EO was involved in Canada, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan and Uganda
[edit] Business buccaneer
The front page of The Independent of August 3, 1998 was headlined:
- "Will Tony Buckingham be the next Tiny Rowland?"
The article continued:
- "Tony Buckingham is a businessman of the hard school, equally adept at running mercenary operations against insurgents as prising oil and gems out of the ground in the most inhospitable climates. A week after the death of the great business buccaneer Tiny Rowland, Mr Buckingham is his obvious heir apparent, a flash of rude colour in among the grey corporate suits. Like Mr Rowland two decades before, Mr Buckingham has made a killing by befriending and helping to power emergent Third World leaders. He even has 'Rowland' as a middle name."
