Chapter 44 The Palau Connection...

Last chapter was written a long time ago. I had left off saying that my former employer had turned down an offer to scam the Canadian Government of funds by setting up a sham company, an office front really, in order to get funds from the Canadian Government for bringing in technology into Canada. Of course the intent was to foster new companies and jobs, but there are always people who can game the system to line their own pockets.

I was on my honeymoon in the Cayman Islands when I was approached by two men trolling the bars looking for businesses to invest in such a scheme. I took the info back to my employers and partners and gave them the facts and they turned it down.

Ah...imagine my surprise when about five years later that they had changed their minds.  By then our association had parted ways under rancorous circumstances. I was employed in Houston, was living with a woman who had just opened an upscale bar in West Houston and we were building the business up. I was working for Schlumberger full time and about 20 hours a weekend at the bar.

I was sitting at the bar when I happened to hear two patrons talking about a prospectus they had received from a company and yada, yada, yada, it was a geo-microbial technology survey in Palau, a place I had done something similar five years earlier. I butted into their conversation and after dropping a few pertinent phrases and facts had their complete attention.

They were indeed discussing an offer from my previous employer to carry out surveys for petroleum in the very same area I had done five years earlier and had written a scathing cover letter to accompany my final report detailing how the project from start to finish had been one big scam designed to fleece any company who was stupid enough to think there was oil there.

My former employer is based in Ochelata, Ok. and it appeared as though they did open a Canadian subsidiary to bilk the Canuke government out of money. The oil company the men represented shall remain nameless. The two guys were nice enough to let me see the reports which they had out in their car. I showed them the reference to my original work in the bibliography of one of the project reports they were citing. It seems they had done another survey there on a volcanic atoll and they were pointing to the methane they detected as an indicator of possible gas and or oil. This was patently horseshit since the gas was thermogenic not biogenic. Long story short I filled them in on all the nefarious practices that the company carried out with respect to the data that they presented to their clients. Many were non-scientific such as manipulating the data and then passing it off as "raw" data to the clients. Then manipulating it again to process it. They also used shoddy practices in so far as they did not throw out obviously spurious data points that were detected by the laboratory methods put in place specifically to detect such anomalous data points.  This was primarily due to Doofus, the son and president, not knowing elementary statistics or laboratory methods. So he included spurious data points that completely threw off the final processed data.

At one time I tried to introduce some new methods by developing a data drop curve. We were sampling live organisms that we removed from their habitat. It is expected that they would begin to die once so removed, and that any delay from sampling to arrival at the lab to be processed would result in changes in the expected norm. I wanted to generate a decline curve for days since sampling, which would have been a simple thing. The father and originator of the technique torpedoed my efforts by deliberately not continuing my work along my established calendar, when I had been sent out into the field, so all the work done up till then on the same samples had to be thrown out.

I left the company shortly there after to go to law school and could not longer travel.

Well my two new friends were more than interested in hearing my comments about the business practices and lack of scruples of the company. They were impressed by my knowledge of the techniques being offered until I told them that I had done a lot of the developmental work while at Phillips over a six year period in research and development. I was also the chief geologist of the company while I worked for them, doing sales, project management, implementation, data analysis and client reporting and relations.  I knew the stuff cold and told the two men that I felt my former employer was misrepresenting what the technique could do and told them so.

I also let them know what they should ask and what the correct answers were and what they would be told instead.  They both agreed it was not something they were going to recommend to their bosses that they get involved with.

In 2018 I do not know how the company is doing, I do know that the father has died, and possibly the mother, both of whom were the brains of the family. I wanted to lay the involvement with the Canadian con-men at the feet of Doofus  but his father Donald did not die until 2012. and his mother just a few years ago. So it may be that they all made the decision, or that Donald had essentially retired and left Doofus to make all the business decisions. In any event, it was fraud plain and simple.

I felt like I did a service by warning off my two new friends.  Today, the whole issue has been put to bed since all of Palau and its national waters have been declared a Marine and Shark Sanctuary and oil exploration as well as commercial fishing are strictly prohibited. Not too long ago, a couple of Vietnamese fishing trawlers were seized and then burnt by the Palauan Marine Patrol, which has the backing of the US Navy, since there is a defense treaty between the US and the new Republic of Palau.