In courtroom 34 of Stockholm District Court, Ian Lundin was back in his seat at the defence bench on April 21. The prosecution’s request for ten years in prison – and immediate detention at the time of judgment – had not kept him in Geneva, where the former chairman of Lundin Oil resides. Wearing a dark tie, grey jacket and blue shirt, he sat beside his lawyers as defence counsel Thomas Wetterberg opened what will be the defence’s final “three week long” answer to 32 months of a trial where two executives of the Swedish petroleum company Lundin Oil are accused of complicity in war crimes committed in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.
Wetterberg said he would now present the defence’s view of “what has been proven in the case, and what has not been proven”. The structure itself of his submission was a statement. Where the prosecution had urged the court to see “the forest, not only the trees”, the defence announced 31 sections, following the indictment’s allegations chronologically and point by point. “The burden of proof lies with the prosecution,” Wetterberg reminded the court. “The accused does not have to prove his innocence.”
According to Wetterberg, the prosecution cannot rely on a general historical picture of Sudan, the war, or the oil economy. Each alleged fact must first be proven through specific evidence. Only then, he argued, may it be placed in a broader context.
For the defence, this is decisive. If the prosecution claims a “systematic use” of unlawful methods of warfare in “Block 5A”, Lundin’s prospection area in Sudan, then each individual incident must be established before it can be used to prove a pattern. “If the evidence is not sufficient in an individual case, it must be sorted out,” Wetterberg said.
What the case is about
In its core, the case is about whether corporate decisions can amount to complicity in war crimes. Prosecutors argue that between 1999 and 2003, Sudanese government forces and allied militias carried out a campaign of violence in Block 5A. Civilians were allegedly subjected to aerial bombardments, the burning of villages, looting and widespread forced displacement. These acts constitute the principal crimes in the indictment.
Ian Lundin and former CEO Alexandre Schneiter are not accused of ordering these attacks. Instead, they are charged with “aiding and abetting them”. The prosecution’s case is built on the idea that a series of corporate decisions taken by the company contributed to the conditions in which the violence occurred.
The central legal question is therefore not only whether war crimes were committed, but whether there is a sufficiently close causal link between the company’s actions and those crimes. The prosecution argues that the presence of oil and the demands of the project fundamentally shaped the conflict, turning it into a campaign to secure territory for extraction.
The defence rejects this narrative, maintaining that the violence must be understood in the context of a complex civil war driven by multiple actors and shifting alliances. In their view, the company’s activities were lawful, typical for the industry, and cannot be causally linked to the alleged crimes.
Wetterberg began the closing arguments by attacking not only the prosecution’s interpretation of the evidence, but also its underlying confidence. The court, he said, was being asked to assess events that occurred in southern Sudan almost 30 years ago, in a place radically different from Sweden. Had the events taken place in Sweden, he argued, the court would have possessed a basic understanding of the geography, institutions and social conditions. But in this case, that foundation is missing. “Everything is as far removed from Swedish conditions as it is possible to be,” Wetterberg said. In his view, the trial has not been “educational” in the way the prosecution suggested. On the contrary, he said, it has shown “how much we do not know about Sudan”. And that lack of knowledge, he argued, does not lower the prosecution’s burden of proof; it raises the demands placed on the prosecution’s investigation.
“That it happened in Sudan 30 years ago creates no evidentiary relief for the prosecution,” he said.
The may 1999 offensive – “reality-defying”
One of the prosecution’s central claims is that in May 1999 the Sudanese army, together with allied militia groups, began offensive military operations in and around Block 5A in order to secure areas for oil exploration and thereby enable Lundin’s activities. Wetterberg described that allegation as geographically and practically implausible. The reason such claims may not immediately sound absurd, he argued, is that few in the courtroom have a concrete sense of Block 5A’s geography and climate. To illustrate the scale, Lundin’s lawyer placed Block 5A on a Swedish map. The alleged military operations, he said, would have stretched from Stockholm to Jönköping and out toward the Baltic Sea.
The area was enormous, flat and difficult to traverse. Several witnesses had described it as inaccessible to motor vehicles even during the dry season. During the rainy season, Wetterberg said, the prosecution’s claim became “reality-defying”. He referred to reports describing how the rains began in April, peaked between June and August, and receded only in November. In low-lying areas, water could remain on the ground. Around Thar Jath, where the company drilled, there could be 30 centimetres of water.
The defence’s point was simple: if rain and flooding made it impossible for the company to operate, the same conditions must also have affected the Sudanese army. An offensive military operation in those circumstances, Wetterberg argued, would have required troops to move through swamp-like terrain, maintain supply lines, transport food and ammunition, avoid disease and avoid being cut off. “If we had lived in Bentiu, we would have known this,” he said, comparing it to the kind of practical local knowledge Swedes possess about not hiking in the mountainous Sarek national park, in northern Sweden, in gym shoes.
The prosecution, he said, had never proved that the Sudanese army had the capacity to conduct such an offensive during the rainy season. “They have not been interested in what the area actually looked like. They have not been there. They have had a satellite perspective – and from there you do not see what is on the ground.”
Irrelevant or changed testimonies
The defence then turned to the trial itself. Wetterberg noted that after the opening presentations, most of the nearly three-year proceeding had been devoted to witness examinations, including what he described as “the longest interrogations of accused persons in Swedish legal history”. After hearing around a hundred people, he said, nothing had caused the defence to revise its opening presentation. “On the contrary,” he said, “it provides further support for what the defence said then.”
Many witnesses, Wetterberg argued, had spoken about matters far removed from the concrete allegations in the indictment. He suggested that after some hearings the judges may have asked themselves: “What did we do here today?”
According to the defence, 19 of the 32 complainants fell outside the indictment in terms of “time or geography”. In several cases, he said, prosecutors did not establish the necessary link to the charged events. Wetterberg was especially critical of what he described as changed testimony. Almost all complainants, he said, gave accounts that differed materially from earlier statements, while prosecutors did not ensure that these deviations were properly brought before the court.
The most striking example, he said, was church leader James Ninrew, who had helped recruit complainants. Wetterberg called the discrepancies in his testimony “monumental” – concerning where he had been, when he had been there, what had happened and when it had happened.
The prosecution, he argued, had criticised company witnesses for weak memories, but that was a consequence of time. They were being asked about events more than two decades old. That was not the witnesses’ fault. “The effect of time burdens the prosecution, not the witnesses,” Wetterberg said.
“There is a difference between receiving information and making decisions”
Wetterberg’s sharpest criticism was directed at the prosecution’s closing argument. According to him, the prosecutors had not dealt with the complex chain required to connect an alleged act of complicity to a principal war crime. The alleged causal link, he said, was “sweeping and imprecise”.
Nor had the prosecution identified in detail the individual acts that would show systematic use of an unlawful method of warfare. The legal question of nexus – the connection between alleged crimes and the armed conflict – received only “a few words”, he said. Instead, Wetterberg described the prosecution’s method as jumping between selected paragraphs and documents, omitting material that did not fit the narrative. “In almost every slide shown by the prosecution there are errors,” he said. “We are without limit critical of the analysis of the investigation.”
Defence counsel Henrik Tendorf then took over. His section was titled “Certain basic facts” and began with the legal framework for oil operations in Sudan. He described the Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement, EPSA, as part of an internationally recognised contractual model developed for relations between states and foreign companies. Under that model, the host state retained rights to profit, ownership and oversight. “It was legitimate for the company to enter into the EPSA with the internationally recognised state of Sudan,” Tendorf said. “The meetings that followed from the agreement were also legitimate.” He emphasised that during the relevant period there were no UN, EU or Swedish sanctions against oil operations in Sudan.
The defence attacked what it described as the prosecution’s portrayal of Ian Lundin as the person controlling operations in Block 5A. The project, Tendorf reminded the court, was run by a consortium consisting of Sudan Ltd, Austria’s OMV, Malaysia’s Petronas and Sudanese Sudapet. “This was a joint project, not Lundin’s own project,” he said. Decisions on seismic work, drilling and force majeure were taken jointly. Ian Lundin, as chairman of the parent company, did not have operational responsibility for the Sudan project or for other subsidiary operations, Tendorf argued.
“There is a difference between receiving information and making decisions,” he said. “That is something the prosecution does not keep apart.”
War before, during and after oil
A central defence theme was that violence in the area did not begin with Lundin Oil and did not end when the company left. Tendorf argued that the investigation shows multiple conflicts with ethnic dimensions before, during and after the indictment period. He referred to historical tensions between Nuer and Dinka, the split within the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebellion in 1991, and later violence in independent South Sudan (after 2011), including after the state had control over its own natural resources.
This, he argued, shows that other forces were at work. “It was completely different forces than, if the expression is allowed, ‘the Arabs in the north’,” Tendorf said.
The defence also challenged the prosecution’s claim that the area was calm before 1997. James Ninrew, Tendorf noted, had previously said in the Talisman litigation – another oil company that was sued for complicity in international crimes committed in Sudan – that he first fled the city of Koch in 1995 because of a ground attack. Other witnesses had described fighting in Block 5A between SPLA John Garang and Riek Machar between 1991 and 1997. Susanne Wissing, who worked for the World Food Programme in Western Upper Nile from 1993 to 1998, had also described insecurity and fighting before the oil companies began operations in the area.
The defence’s conclusion was that the conflicts existed before, during and after Lundin’s engagement in Block 5A – and were not caused by that engagement.
An alternative view of Sudan’s government
Wetterberg was back and he challenged the prosecution’s repeated description of Sudan as an “Islamist military dictatorship”. The label may be politically accurate, he suggested, but it cannot replace evidence about how the government functioned, how decisions were made, or how individual officials in the state, army and security apparatus acted. The defence argued that the case lacks a serious investigation into the organisation of the Sudanese government and the intentions of different state actors.
Wetterberg said the international view of Sudan was not uniform. The United States sought sanctions and regarded Sudan as a pariah state, but Sweden, the EU and other actors, according to the defence, had a more positive view of business activity in Sudan. He pointed to elements in the evidence that, in the defence’s view, complicate the picture: the 1997 Khartoum Peace Agreement contained references to religious freedom and basic rights in the south; the government accepted UN-organised aid deliveries to SPLA-controlled areas; and Sudan later accepted South Sudan’s independence.
Wetterberg also referred to evidence that OEPA officials – Sudan state’s operational arm in the oil sector – acted professionally and that contacts with the Sudanese state’s own security firm Petroleum Security and the military did not show that these actors were automatically prepared to “participate in abuses”. The army was a conscript army, he said, with many soldiers from the south. Some reports even described the army and Petroleum Security helping civilians during famine and floods.
“They were human beings, just like us,” Wetterberg said.
The prosecution, he concluded, cannot simply call Sudan a dictatorship and let that serve as proof that all state actors were indifferent to civilian suffering or prepared to assist killing and displacement.
What oil operations needed was peace, not war
The defence addressed a Toronto Star article from 1997 in which Ian Lundin spoke of “risk” and “potential”. Wetterberg said the prosecution had misunderstood the meaning of risk in that context. When an oil company speaks of risk to shareholders, he said, it refers to the possibility that invested money may be lost. It does not mean that the company is prepared to endanger employees or civilians to make money. The investigation, he argued, showed the opposite: the company evacuated, protected staff and civilians, and at times accepted major costs.
Defence lawyer Lina Hansson then addressed fighting near company operations in 1998. In January that year, fighting between local groups passed through Highland Camp. Twelve people died and the camp was evacuated. According to Hansson, those on site understood it as fighting between ethnic groups, not something directed at the company. Security reports themselves, Hansson argued, contained different explanations.
The prosecution’s theory that the government pursued a strategy of divide and rule to create disorder and justify military entry into the block was also rejected. Why, Hansson asked, would the government destroy peace after obtaining it? At the time, no oil had yet been found and production lay far in the future. What oil operations needed was peace, not war.
The Thar Jath incident
It was time to address the attack at Thar Jath in May 1999. During the prosecution’s closing, it was argued that the oil discovery in Thar Jath, caused the military to enter the area and the militia SSDF to attack the company. Wetterberg said this “did not fit the evidence”.
According to the defence, the army entered only on 4 May, almost two days after the killings. The defence also argued that the investigation does not establish why the guards were killed or why the army entered with 700 men. The company’s security advisor Richard Ramsey had described the attack as directed against “northern Sudanese”, not the company.
Wetterberg also noted that Adolf Lundin, Ian’s father and founder of the company, and Keith Hill, then country director, had visited the rig on 2 May. Had there been an ongoing military mobilisation, he argued, they would not have been able to travel there. A post-incident report stating that the oil discovery “may have” been the cause was, he said, speculation. For the defence, the army’s move after the killings was a legitimate step to protect equipment at Thar Jath – not the beginning of an unlawful offensive campaign to secure oil areas.
The defence then moved to one of the central allegations against Ian Lundin personally: that after the Thar Jath incident he demanded that the Sudanese government secure and create conditions for the company’s operations.
At the heart lies a single document: a weekly report suggesting that the company now required a 50-kilometre security zone around its operations in Block 5A. The prosecutor’s interpretation is that such a demand could only be met through military means. Creating and maintaining a security radius of that size in a conflict zone, they argue, would have required the Sudanese army and allied militias to clear the area – potentially through the kind of operations described elsewhere in the indictment.
In that sense, the alleged security zone becomes a link in the chain: from corporate request to military action, and from there to alleged attacks on civilians.
The defence rejects this entirely.
Wetterberg argued that there is no evidence that such a demand was ever communicated to the Sudanese government or the military. None of the company witnesses, he said, recognised the claim. Instead, the reference to a 50-kilometre zone should be understood as part of internal or contractor-level risk assessments, conditions set by security staff, drilling contractors such as Schlumberger, or seismic companies like BGP for their personnel to operate safely. “These were not demands made by Ian Lundin to the government,” Wetterberg said.
They also emphasise the wording itself. The weekly-report indicates that such conditions had “not been fulfilled” – suggesting that they were not implemented, and therefore could not have triggered any military response. More broadly, the defence argues that the entire interpretation rests on an assumption: that a request for security automatically implies a request for offensive military operations. “There is nothing in the material that indicates that the company expected or required offensive operations,” Wetterberg said.
No trace of intent
Apart from that, what would make such a demand criminal, Wetterberg said, is the prosecution’s claim that it necessarily entailed offensive military operations in which unlawful methods were used. “What they claim between the lines is that Ian Lundin intended civilians to be killed so that operations could be carried out – that is what it says, although rewritten,” Wetterberg said. But the defence presented a different picture. After evacuation, the company had two concerns: whether tests of the borehole could be completed and whether equipment left behind could be recovered. Security assessments were made to determine whether the rig could be visited and whether testing could continue.
The so-called forward plan, Wetterberg argued, concerned technical questions about the rig and interrupted tests. The criteria discussed there were not presented to the government or the army. The company, he said, was a passive recipient of information. The defence then followed the evidence showing that equipment was recovered between 27 May and 19 June 1999, and that company employees and consultants were back in the block for that work.
Later security documents discussed future operations and the guard force. A report appendix titled “observations and recommendations” recommended that future operations be guarded by the regular Sudanese army. But Wetterberg stressed that this was framed as a guard force, not as a request for offensive military operations.
The following minutes from a board meeting among the partners likewise referred to security being handled by the regular Sudanese army. According to the defence, nothing in the oral or written evidence suggests that this was really a request for military offensives. As for Ian Lundin’s role, the defence said he denied making or deciding on any such demand. He was not operationally involved. Keith Hill was responsible for Block 5A, and no witness said Ian Lundin took detailed operational security decisions.
“There is not a single document in this case showing that Ian Lundin had anything to do with this,” Wetterberg said.
The defence also attacked the prosecution’s theory of intent. Before Thar Jath, Wetterberg said, the company had good relations with local communities, visited villages before operations and employed many civilians from the area. For the prosecution’s theory to work, he argued, everyone in the company must have undergone a sudden change in attitude after the Thar Jath incident. “From wanting a good relationship with the civilian population, everyone would have had to become prepared to see civilians die,” he said. There is, according to the defence, “not a trace” of such a change – and therefore no trace of intent, either in Ian Lundin or anyone else in the company.
The missing causal chain
Late in the day, the screens in courtroom 34 showed the heading “Allegation 6” in white letters on a green background. Green, as someone once told me, is the colour used in old submarines and nuclear power plants because it signals calm.
Allegation 6 is the foundation of the prosecution’s case. It states that from at least 1997, the armed conflict also came to concern control over future oil extraction, and that in May 1999 the Sudanese government launched offensive military operations in and near Block 5A to take control of areas for oil exploration and create conditions for Lundin’s operations.
Tendorf dissected the wording.
“These are the allegations that must then be legally connected to acts of complicity and war crimes,” he said. “But the investigation is on a collision course with these allegations.”
The defence’s argument was that the Sudanese army neither had the resources nor the intention to take and hold military control over Block 5A. It was a conscript army with limited equipment, exhausted by civil war with the SPLA. Taking control would have required not only defeating rebel groups but maintaining a permanent presence and supply lines across enormous areas.
“We say none of this happened,” Tendorf stated.
Instead, the defence argued, the company could operate only when there was peace with the armed groups in the area. Document after document, Tendorf said, showed that peace was the condition for work. If fighting broke out, operations had to stop. “This was only a selection of documents showing black on white that political solutions for peace were the method – not offensive military operations,” he said.
The defence acknowledged that Peter Gadet’s rebel SSDF [South Sudan Defence Forces, pro-government forces created under the 1997 Khartoum Peace Accords] group did not want peace in the area. But, Tendorf argued, the company could operate because Gadet was not present in the operating areas and did not attack the operations. Had he wanted to stop the company, he could have created an incident, for example with mortars, forcing evacuation. The prosecution has cited security recommendations about bringing troops south of Thar Jath. Tendorf said this referred to “flooding the area” with troops to increase security through presence – not to engage an enemy. He also reminded the court that witnesses had said a private oil company could not decide where the army of a sovereign state deployed.
The day ended with the defence returning to causation.
For complicity, Tendorf argued, there must be a legally relevant causal connection between the alleged act of assistance and the war crime. That requires a chain: an act, leading through the government, then to the army or allied militia, then to the specific crimes in the field.
The defence says that chain has not been identified.
When the defence asked prosecutors how the alleged messages or agreements reached the perpetrators, they were told that high-level regime actors were assisted – not directly the individual soldiers or militiamen who applied the unlawful methods. For Tendorf, that answer does not solve the problem. The indictment, he argued, does not explain how the alleged assistance actually promoted specific war crimes. “One cannot even theoretically uphold this allegation,” he said.
In relation to militias, he said, the missing bridge would have to consist of some form of instruction or control from the government or militia leadership, linked to the alleged act of assistance. But no such evidence exists. The prosecution, he said, has accepted that there were no written or oral orders of that kind to militia groups.
The defence’s closing theme was therefore the reverse of the prosecution’s. The prosecution says war enabled oil. The defence says oil required peace.
“It was not fighting, but peace, that made operations possible.”
