ETHIOPIA: 12-to-8 Concession

With jackals and hyenas howling outside the Royal Palace at Addis Ababa last week, a jovial Englishman with the fat chaps of John Bull and a dour Maine Yankee worked furiously in secret. They were writing up something in English, something so important that no one Ethiopian scribe got a look at the whole thing. By the Emperor’s command the English sheets were scrambled and handed out of order to different Ethiopian translators, all vowed to secrecy.

Fat Chaps kissed his wife in England on Aug. 10, told her he was going to Ethiopia, and left her to take care of the children in his Amroth Castle, South Wales. This was once the country seat of Lord Kylsant, also a beefy John Bull, who went to jail for his irregularities as chairman of the Royal Mail (TIME, Nov. 16, 1931 et ante). There today Fat Chaps is respected as Mr. Francis M. Rickett, velvet-capped Master of Foxhounds of the swank Craven Hunt in Berkshire. The local lords and squires who hunt with him know nothing about oil, and little about Mr. Rickett. In Irak sheiks know him as one of Britain’s slickest oil promoters. While “Lawrence of Arabia” was worrying about the Arabs’ rights, Mr. Rickett sewed up so much oil with large promises and small doles of hard cash that when the dust cleared London’s fiscal tycoons were obliged to cut him in on a heavy share of profits from the Irak and Mosul fields.

In wild Addis Ababa last week Mr. Rickett was not wasting his time. Nor was lean, hollow-cheeked Yankee Everett Andrew Colson, who sat across from Fat Chaps. In 1930 the Ethiopian Government, profoundly suspicious of Britain, France, Italy and all the great colonial powers, asked the non-predatory U. S. to pick a fiscal adviser whom Ethiopia could really trust. Obligingly the State Department supplied a list of young U. S. economists willing to work in Addis Ababa for a pittance more than they could make at home. From the list Mr. Colson was picked by the Emperor, hired at $9,000 per year, and went to live with his wife in a sizzling, tin-roofed bungalow. It was this pair, Fat Chaps & Lean Chaps, who persuaded and advised Emperor Power of Trinity last week to make a move which His Majesty sincerely hoped would bring Great Britain to Ethiopia’s side this week in bluffing down Fascist Italy at Geneva (see p. 19).

Half a Kingdom. Fat Chaps held out to the acquisitive, Semitic Emperor a promise of at least $15,000,000 per year—triple Ethiopia’s present revenue—if Power of Trinity would sign away for 75 years virtually all subsoil rights—precious metals and chemical substances as well as oil—in something more than half the Ethiopian Empire.

To make the concession a pointed barb at Italy it was made to cover no less and no more than the Ethiopian area which by the Treaty of 1906 was declared a “sphere of Italian influence.” This area is being visualized by thinking of Ethiopia, which is roughly round in shape, as the face of a watch. Then all of Ethiopia covered by a minute hand as it sweeps around from 12 to 8 is covered by the Rickett Concession. Not in this area is Lake Tana, vital water source of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. On the imaginary watch, Tana is at the tip of the hour hand at 10:30.

Emperor Power of Trinity sat drawnfaced with his two pet dogs frisking about his feet as Fat Chaps & Lean Chaps concluded their work and Ethiopia’s elaborate Seal of The Conquering Lion of Judah was affixed in token of His Majesty’s assent. What had he done? It all depended on who Fat Chaps’ backers really are. Every undeveloped country is fair game for plausible promoters who go about hinting that they represent du Pont, or De Beers or Krupp. Last week Francis M. Rickett said that his backers were Standard Oil and British capitalists whom he refused to name. They are putting in, he said, $50,000,000 and work will start almost at once on roads, telegraphs, railway and pipe lines. “War or no war,” said Fat Chaps, “we are going ahead!”

Boarding an airplane provided by the Emperor to take him to an unannounced destination, Promoter Rickett fired this parting shot: “I should like to say to Mussolini, who is an old friend, that there is plenty of room for Italy to participate in the exploitation of such a hospitable land as Ethiopia without starting a war.”

As the plane thundered out of sight Addis Ababa buzzed with rumors that Fat Chaps had also obtained a $20,000,000 dam and pumping station concession at Lake Tana, the object being to increase the volume of water reaching the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

Smeared Britons. In Wall Street, aside from the fact that officials of numerous Standard Oil companies and subsidiaries denied any connection whatever with Francis M. Rickett of whom they said they had never heard, the U. S. fiscal reaction was: “This whole thing looks queer.” With President Roosevelt just done up by the Senate in a neutrality cat’s cradle, what U. S. syndicate, asked Wall Streeters, has millions to risk in Ethiopia, where U. S. economic interest would have to begin by calling for the Marines?

A total but too simple explanation of Fat Chaps would be that Mr. Rickett is lone-wolfing, that he got the concession by making Power of Trinity and his Yankee adviser believe that Standard Oil can stop Mussolini, and having obtained the concession, will now try to sell it to the highest bidder—perhaps even to Mr. Rickett’s “friend,” Benito Mussolini. The Rickett Concession was granted to “the African Development & Exploration Co.” This was recently set up as a Delaware corporation by a discreet Manhattan firm which makes a business of incorporating dummy concerns and keeping their secrets.

In London neither the City nor Whitehall could believe that Sir Sidney Barton, the British Minister at Addis Ababa who has always been described as “extremely close to the Emperor,” could have proved so ineffective as to have been ignorant that a concession of this magnitude was being negotiated under his nose. Nonetheless, Britain’s Foreign Office reacted to the news from Ethiopia with every outward show of consternation. Neither Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare nor League of Nations Minister Anthony Eden could at first be reached, the sacrosanct British weekend having begun, but Foreign Office underlings at once realized that the high, moral case Mr. Eden had been about to present against Italy at Geneva had been smeared and stultified if not destroyed by the taint upon Britain of oil.

Lion’s Paws. When boyish Mr. Eden appeared, there was heard in his office the plaintive cry: “If Mussolini had paid Rickett, the man couldn’t have served Italy better!”

This was on the Eden side of the Foreign Office, the big bay window in which British Idealism is kept on view. On the Hoare side, where upper lips are kept stiff, there was silent, discreet, professional conviction that Sir Sidney Barton in Addis Ababa is anything but a fool, and that Empire progress has often been swiftest when the British Lion’s right paw quite honestly did not know what the left paw was doing. In the City a most unusual rumor was current that the head of one of Britain’s “Big Five” banks, normally as remote as the moon from wildest overseas speculation, is behind Fat Chaps this time.

Particularly if a second concession, involving Lake Tana, has been obtained, Mr. Rickett is operating in what His Majesty’s Government lately told the House of Commons is officially “one of the most vital spheres of British interest.” In past decades concessions obtained by British promoters from unwary potentates have repeatedly enabled British diplomats, often years afterward, to wangle, bluff and bludgeon much Empire spoil into the bag. From this point of view the Lion’s left paw seemed well placed last week.

The right paw, also well placed, nipped out from the Foreign Office a statement that Emperor Power of Trinity was being advised by the British Government to “withhold” whatever concession or concessions he may have granted. Exclaimed His Majesty: “Surely the British Government cannot interfere in a concession granted to the United States! . . .I gave the concession to Standard Oil.” By this time Fat Chaps had arrived in French Somaliland and realized that he had embarrassed London by announcing in Addis Ababa that some of his backers are British. Said Promoter Rickett, changing his tune, “The capital of the African Development & Exploration Co. which received the concession is 100% American.”

Meanwhile Il Duce had batches of musty treaties and agreements dug up by his Foreign Office to prove that Italy can treat whatever Fat Chaps has been granted as null and void.

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