Step by step

I have been writing about the financial interest determining revolutions and wars. Since the time when people started doing business, many of them created the situations where, speaking modern language, the economic situation collapsed, of course there were also situations where something influenced business relations without “human help”. Disasters, geographical discoveries, great epidemics, but also surprising, if we can consider them this way, unpredictable events. I will write about one of them, considering current situation, the one which is very on time. When we search the news services, we can find the information that in July 2008 in one of Geneva’s hotels a Swiss counter-terrorism group entered the room where was staying Hannibal Gadaffi, the son of Libyan dictator and his wife. The group had been called by the hotel staff who had heard terrible screams coming from the hotel room.  After a while it had shown up that Mr and Mrs Gadafii were beating their service without mercy. Mrs Gadaffi had been beating her maid so hard that she had broken the iron. When they saw people with blood on their faces, the security workers had put young Gadaffi on the ground and handcuffed him. The same hapenned with his personal security. Libyans were taken into arrest where they were accused of assault and battery and threats. Two days later, after strong protests of diplomats, young Gadaffi was remanded of bail over 130 thousand euro. Nothing special, it seems that this is just another normal event. But...the result were meaningful. The father - Muammar reacted rapibly and sharply. First thing he had done was halting oil supplies to Switzerland, after that he forbid heir planes to land t on Libyan airports and their ships to enter ports. Libyan embassy in Switzerland was closed. Gadaffi’s diplomats asked the UN to liquidate Switzerland and share its teritory between Germany, Italy and France. Libya had also withdrawn milions of dollars from their banks and all Swiss companies were expelled from the country.

It sounds like a story from an American comic book. It is still unknown how much did people and companies loose. I need to say, that Libyan oil reserves are estimated to about 42 billion barrels, which places them at the third position in Africa. Petrol industry (oil and gas export) supplies 75% of GDP and 95% od export profits and shares only 3% of labour market, where unemployment rate grows to 32%. Not a long time ago, Libya was going to expand this sector, planning to grow the mining to 3mln barrels daily in 2015.  By the way, we can only guess how much influence had these plans for other producers’ interest. The same thing goes with their enthusiasm after it was announced.  In whose interest the crisis we have now hits the most? It is worth to check this in order to see how much “spontaneous” recent events are. After the last UN decisions there are estimations that only Russia can lose about 4 billion dolars after the military contracts were halted. It was a result of the UN embargo on weapon supplies to this country. As the the “Interfax” agency had informed according to their anonymous military-diplomatic sources, Libya is one of the largest recipients of Russian weapon supplies.  The contract signed between this country and Russia for military equipment supplies is worth about 2 billion dolars. “At the final step is the worth 1,8 bln. dolars agreement for plane, helicopters and air-defence systems supplies” - he said. He also added that Libyan authorities were also interested in buying about 15 Su-35 planes, new KA-52 “Aligator” battle helicopters, T-90S tanks, 636 class submarines and S-400 air-defence systems/

As we can see, the world r at least the part of it has got its reasons to feel anxious. On the other hand the oil crisis would be felt by all of us. There is one question which should be asked - are we sure that nobody would get a profit?