BRITAIN: Oilgate's Slick Business

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For weeks the British press had been warming up, bannering the advance suspicions and denials that attend a grave and imminent scandal. The questions were incessant. Had the government proclaimed a stern law and then winked at its offenders? Who knew about the misdeeds? How much did they know? The affair that Britons were dubbing "Oilgate" threatened to reach into the highest places. At issue was whether ministers of the Crown in the years following Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence in 1965 were aware that British Petroleum (BP) and London-based Shell International were helping to supply oil to that outlaw colony in defiance of British statute and U.N. sanctions.

Last week the British government released a 500-page investigative report that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions. Not only has Rhodesia received a steady supply of petroleum products since its secession, but for at least eleven years British subsidiary companies were among the chief suppliers. Worse, Her Majesty's government, at the very time that it was piously trumpeting its sanctions against Rhodesia, had quietly acquiesced in a plan to circumvent them.

The Bingham Report (named after Lawyer Thomas Bingham, appointed to head the investigation 16 months ago by Foreign Secretary David Owen) discloses that the oil sanctions began earnestly enough in the first weeks of furor just after Salisbury, resisting Britain's plans for black majority rule, declared its independence on Nov. 11, 1965. Within days, Parliament enacted the Southern Rhodesia Act, reaffirming Crown rule and authorizing the government to impose a variety of sanctions on the rebel colony. On Dec. 17, 1965, an executive order outlawed the shipment of petroleum and petroleum products to Rhodesia.

With a flamboyant wave of the Union Jack, the Royal Navy was ordered to blockade the Portuguese Mozambican port of Beira, where a new oil pipeline led into Rhodesia. The blockade lasted ten years, but was only window dressing. Shipments to Rhodesia continued to arrive at the old petroleum port of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), several hundred miles to the south. From there the oil was shepherded by Shell Mozambique, a U.K.-incorporated firm, into the hands of South African brokers, who sent it north by rail through Mozambique to Rhodesia.

Mozambique and, much more important, South Africa were the glaring gaps in Britain's purported wall of sanctions against Rhodesia, and the government was not about to plug them. Reason: British investment in South Africa is huge —currently about $10 billion—and trade between the two nations amounts to nearly $3 billion a year.