During his confirmation hearings, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson often acted as if he was running for the World’s Most Ignorant CEO Award by being completely unaware of actions at the company he left just days ago. Despite the fact that his chair in the top office is still warm, Tillerson often acted as if he couldn’t find Exxon’s headquarters on a map. Routing around sanctions? Sweet deals for autocrats? Burying their own evidence on climate change? Nope. None of that rang a bell.
When it came to the sanctions on Iran, Sudan, and Syria and Exxon’s efforts to evade those sanctions by working through a European subsidiary, Tillerson’s memory made Swiss cheese seem solid.
“I do not recall the details of the circumstances around what you just described. The question would have to go to ExxonMobil for them to be able to answer that,” Tillerson told Menendez.
“I don’t recall the incident,” Tillerson told Merkley. “I’ve read about it, but I don’t recall it specifically.”
Tillerson’s memory may have drawn a blank, but his actions were perfectly in line with the rest of his philosophy. Like Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson never thought it was his job to act responsibly. He always put the onus on someone else to stop him.
On Jan. 6, 2006, the SEC wrote to Tillerson noting press reports about company sales and the lack of any mention of them in the company’s annual compliance report to the agency.
That’s not “wrote to Exxon,” it’s “wrote to Tillerson.” Maybe there’s something about Iran that makes people sleepy, because this is the most convenient case of amnesia since Iran-Contra.
It’s not just that ExxonMobil worked with a European subsidiary to make these deals. Exxon created the company, Infineum, in a joint venture with Shell expressly to enable such actions.
Establishing Infineum “would clearly seem as a move designed to do business with Iran to evade sanctions on Iran,” Menendez charged on Wednesday.
Merkley noted that Tillerson had been directly contacted by the SEC: “Do you have any memory of that or discussions of whether Exxon should have disclosed those transactions?
“Senator, I think the question would be best placed to ExxonMobil, where — where the information would reside,” he said.
“No sir, you were — you were there,” Merkley said. “I’m asking if you had discussions about this or have a — have a memory of it.”
“I do not,” Tillerson said.
Tillerson handily forgot that Exxon created a company to bypass sanctions, forgot that the company was repeatedly used to bypass sanctions, and forgot that the SEC called him to check on their bypassing sanctions.
But he remembered that their legalistic maneuvering around the sanctions stood up to scrutiny.
For Tillerson, that’s all that counts. Not that you did something wrong, but that you got away with it.