Fight over seabed agency leadership turns nasty

WASHINGTON — Allegations of possible payments to help secure votes. Claims of abuse of agency funds by top diplomats. A possible job offer to entice a candidate to withdraw from a race.

These are not the shenanigans of a corrupt election in an unstable country. Rather, they are efforts in the seemingly genteel parlors of a United Nations-affiliated agency, meant to sway decisions related to the start of seabed mining of the metals used in electric vehicles.

It is all part of a nasty fight over who will be the next leader of the International Seabed Authority, which controls mining in international waters worldwide.

The accusations of trickery underscore the controversial nature of the agency’s coming agenda and the billions of dollars at stake. Some countries are fiercely opposed to the idea of mining the world’s deepest waters, while others see it as a badly needed economic opportunity. Whoever helms the agency’s top post over the next few years will have considerable influence over these decisions.

Michael Lodge, the secretary-general at the International Seabed Authority since 2016, is urging the diplomats from the agency’s 168 member nations to elect him to a third four-year term. From that perch, he hopes to help the agency finalize environmental rules as it prepares to accept its first application, perhaps as early as this fall, to start industrial-scale mining in the Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and Mexico.

His opponent, Leticia Carvalho, is an oceanographer and former oil industry regulator from Brazil. She has called for a more deliberative approach, arguing that several years of work likely remain to finish writing the rules. Her position is that no mining applications should be approved until that process is wrapped up.

In the midst of this already intense campaign, a former senior Seabed Authority executive filed a complaint with the United Nations in May, accusing Lodge and his top deputy of misusing agency funds.

Supporters of the two candidates each have accused the other side of attempting to influence the outcome of the election by offering to pay travel costs for delegates or to pay delegations’ past-due membership fees. Countries in arrears are generally prohibited from voting, and 38 nations were behind in payments as of May.

Each nation pays a different amount — depending on the size of the economy — as much as $1.8 million this year for China or as low as $831 for Rwanda, with the money used to support the agency’s annual budget.

Adding to the intrigue, the ambassador of Kiribati, a small Pacific island nation that is sponsoring Lodge’s nomination, attempted late last month to persuade Carvalho to drop out of the race, in exchange for a possible high-level staff job at the Seabed Authority.

If this clandestine move had worked, it would have left Lodge unopposed. Lodge did not respond when his office was asked in written questions about this effort. But in a six-page statement to The New York Times, Lodge and his office disputed any suggestions that he had misused agency funds or otherwise tried to improperly influence the election.

“You have a collation of vague, unsubstantiated, unfounded and anonymous rumors, gossip and hearsay which are demonstrably untrue, lack any foundation of fact or evidence and do not stand up to any objective scrutiny,” Lodge said in the statement, adding that he and the Seabed Authority “follow the most rigorous standards of international good governance and management.”

The attempt to bait Carvalho into dropping out sparked an angry response from her and the Brazilian delegation. “We have a great candidate who has already received a great deal of support, and we will win this election,” said Bruno Imparato, a Brazilian diplomat who is helping organize Carvalho’s campaign.

Teburoro Tito, the Kiribati ambassador who urged Carvalho to leave the race, confirmed the job offer in an interview with the Times. He added that Lodge had signed off on the proposed deal as part of a strategy to assure Lodge’s reelection at the next meeting of the Seabed Authority in late July and early August at its headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica.

“We don’t want someone to come in and break what ISA is trying to do,” Tito said in an interview, recalling what he said to Carvalho. “I come from an island. We always believe in reconciliation. We don’t want too much dispute in the village.”

Lodge, in his statement, said he “was not privy to the discussions referenced and is not party to the alleged proposal.” The agency said all vacant positions were advertised through official channels and subject to competitive recruitment.

The Seabed Authority is governed by the 168 member states that ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, declaring that any ocean floor metals in international waters are “the common heritage of mankind” and that access is governed exclusively by the Seabed Authority.

In the decades since, the Seabed Authority has approved 31 exploration contracts authorizing mapping and other preparatory work in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. Now the agency is preparing to consider applications for industrial-scale mining, conducted by bulldozerlike machines dropped to the ocean floor miles below the surface.

While some countries are eager to move ahead, at least 25 have proposed a moratorium or “precautionary pause,” arguing that there is not enough data to ensure mining will not cause harm.

China has the most of these contracts — five in total. But the exploratory contracts are distributed among several countries including Russia, Poland, India, France, Germany, Japan and several Pacific Island nations. The United States never ratified the treaty, but it participates in the debate.

Member states can do the exploration work themselves or hire contractors like The Metals Co., a Nasdaq-traded, Canada-based mining company that wants to start extracting millions of tons of nodules containing metals from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean as soon as 2026.

The company estimates that just one of its contract areas — a 46,000-square-mile section of the Pacific — would generate $31 billion in net earnings over 25 years of mining.

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