Bitter Chocolate (37 page)

It's important to remember that this is money extracted from farmers in the form of taxes and fees, which are supposed to be redirected back into projects that will improve the lives of people and communities already impoverished by exploitation and pitiful prices. They are told that the funds will be used to stabilize the price of cocoa beans and help them through inevitable sags in the market. But as much as two-thirds of their potential income from cocoa farming vanishes, in the form of “special”
levies, into the coffers of government and the elite para-public agencies for purposes about which the farmers know little or nothing. No matter how much liberalization affects the cocoa prices, the tariffs imposed by Gbagbo's regime are a major cause of the chronic poverty in the countryside.

As head of the Coffee and Cocao Bourse (BCC), Lucien Tapé Doh is one of the most formidable members of the
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. The waiting room in his office is full of people with needs who all jump to their feet nervously when he enters the room. Tapé Doh ushers Ange and me into his inner sanctum, along with another very anxious-looking couple. “Just a moment,” he tells us and gestures to chairs. He makes a call on his mobile phone and barks an order:
“Il faut que tu payes tout de suite!”
(You must pay immediately!) He clicks off the phone and tells the couple that their money will be in their bank account the next day. They are hugely grateful.

Tapé Doh is a squat round man who wears traditional attire: loosely fitted colourful shirt and pants. But his clothing is much too big even for his extensive girth, and he seems to be lost in its floral fabric. I detect a familiar sweet smell in the office as we wait for him to adjust papers on his desk, and I notice a large slab of chocolate cake, melting in the heat. It's decorated with a bulbous sugary orange object that looks like a miniature pumpkin but, on closer examination, is supposed to represent a cocoa pod. The inscription on the cake reads “Côte d'Ivoire—Land of Cocoa.” It's odd to see and smell real chocolate here, since almost no one eats the stuff in Africa, in part because it's too expensive, but also because it turns to liquid much too quickly. (In an effort to find chocolate that could be sent with U.S. troops into the deserts of Kuwait in 1991—a highly lucrative contract—the Mars Corporation tried to develop a bar that could take the
heat. The people most famous for the confection that “melts in your mouth and not in your hand” found it was difficult not to compromise the taste and texture when you changed the fundamental chemistry of chocolate. As the Marquis de Sade knew from his suppositories, solid chocolate liquefies quickly in warm places.)

Tapé Doh is another very wealthy man who has profited from the reorganization of the
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. The BCC is one of the most impenetrable of the agencies that supposedly manage Côte d'Ivoire's most important exports. Local people describe him as an uneducated “bushman,” but one who is nonetheless a shrewd and cagey operator. What he does best is to show how the passion of African nationalism can be manipulated to serve any purpose.

The BCC is neither private nor public, he explains, but a unique African mix of the two. These unaccountable agencies that control cocoa are simply “Africa's solution to Africa's problems,” a phrase expressing a sentiment that has galvanized nationalist feeling all over Africa since the end of colonialism. Though all of the BCC's money comes from obligatory taxes and fees, the agency is not a public service, he says. “Transparency is an idea of the foreigners that simply gives an advantage to our competitors,” he explains. “The European Union just wants to get control of us.” Tapé Doh gives the same nationalist line one hears from the
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everywhere, including the mayor of Gagnoa, Roger Gnohite, as well as the Young Patriots who justify the expulsion of immigrants from the farmlands of the region as an act of “masters in our own house.”

The Bourse is in charge of coordinating cocoa and coffee exports and establishing the floor price for beans sold in Côte d'Ivoire. It's supposed to guarantee a decent income from the exports and to help farmers benefit from higher world cocoa prices. But even at the height of the civil war, when prices were at their best, the farmers didn't profit. Tapé Doh says the high
taxes and fees are necessary to pay for the war effort. Farmers need security, and the weapons are for their own good. If the violence is sometimes directed at the immigrants, well, it's possibly because they are supporting the rebels.

Billions of West African francs flow into the coffers of the BCC with no public record of where the money goes from there. Ivorian farmers have started to smuggle their beans into Ghana to take advantage of the price that farmers in the Gold Coast enjoy. Tapé Doh chuckles as he dismisses this: “When our price is higher, the Ghanaians smuggle beans into Côte d'Ivoire. This has been happening for decades.” But the recent trade in contraband cocao has cut deep into Côte d'Ivoire's profits, and the farmers have started to expand their pirating activies. “The important thing is that Ivorians take back the power, that we not be controlled by outsiders,” he says repeatedly. Tapé Doh supports liberalization, claiming it just needs time to take effect. “We had the CAISTAB for forty years. The BCC has existed only for four years,” he says. “Give us time.”

But time is running out for Côte d'Ivoire, and the overwhelming sense one gets from reading the EU audit reports is that the opportunists who run the
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are killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Nowhere is that more apparent than at the third most important cocoa agency, the Regulation and Control Fund (FRC). This is the biggest kitty of money and one that is frequently called
“la caisse noire,”
the black deposit box of the ruling party of Laurent Gbagbo. The FRC is in charge of all financial regulations regarding cocoa and coffee, and it has absolute control over the cocoa and coffee treasury.

The president of the FRC is a woman named Angeline Zilahou Killi, who is tightly tied to the first family and is the godmother of a movement called Two Million Girls for Gbagbo, a campaign that uses children to mythologize the president as the father of the nation. Killi has few if any ties to cocoa production and little expertise in the area. According to Kieffer's Network and
suggested by the EU reports, billions of West African francs have left the fund to pay for arms, to finance a new agricultural bank and to provide “loans” to Gbagbo and his circle. The EU audit reports conclude that the awarding of grants and loans from the FRC is done with “manifest irregularity.”

Madame Killi was not available for an interview when we visited the offices of the FRC, as she was travelling in the United States.

“Where in the U.S.?” I ask her secretary, who had earlier that day confirmed our appointment.

“New York,” she answers. “Madame Killi has just left.”

I ask, “Has she, by any chance, gone to Fulton, New York?”

The reception area at the FRC suddenly falls into an ice-cold silence.

Dropping the name Fulton has much the same effect as mentioning Guy-André Kieffer. Fulton is a subject no one wants to talk about, a word that can clear a room or shut doors. Michel Yehoun, who babbles away about anything, simply snapped, “It's none of your damn business,” when I asked if we could discuss Fulton. It turns out, he had good reason to be defensive. Fulton has become a code word for scam.

Fulton is actually a small town in upstate New York that all but shut down in 2003, when Nestlé, one of Fulton's principal employers at the time, closed its century-old chocolate factory, moving some of its production to other locations, including Brazil, and putting five hundred Fultonians on the street. Nestlé said at the time that the plant wasn't viable, but apparently the experts at Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa
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felt differently. Soon after, the FRC bought the plant and declared it was about to put Fulton, New York, back to work.

Americans cheered the Africans when they arrived. New York Senator Charles Schumer helped to broker the deal (Michel Yehoun was apparently a major player in arranging American support), and the senator's picture appears in a number of promotional
photos featuring the plant, now called the New York Chocolate and Confection Company (NY3C). Federal agencies provided $850, 000 in loans and much more in tax breaks to help the Ivorians revive the operation. Then things got complicated.

Months and then a year passed with not a whiff of the familiar cocoa smell in the air of Oswego County. The economic development agency for the county told the
New York Times
that the company had funds “in the high seven digits” in its bank account and was paying its taxes. But the people of Fulton and the chocolate company creditors were getting nervous.

So what was the holdup? The Ivorians initially claimed they were having trouble getting cocoa beans out of Côte d'Ivoire because of the civil war. This seemed like a plausible explanation. Except that other cocoa corporations importing from Côte d'Ivoire weren't having any supply problems. According to the records of the San-Pédro Port Authority, exports of cocoa surged in 2003 and 2004.

Accountability has never been a strength of the Ivorian cocoa
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, and when U.S. politicians and financial agencies started to ask questions, the FRC had few answers. Lion Capital Management, a San Francisco–based investment company, is listed as the Ivorian chocolate company's U.S. partner with twenty per cent ownership. Lion Capital's creditors were making it clear that they were unhappy with what appeared to be unorthodox business practices and a conflict of interest involving two Ivorian advisors to NY3C. The African treasurer appointed by the FRC, Yalle Agbre, wasn't following the established rules governing American business and the company was slow in paying its bills. The African legal advisor to the company, Kemakolam Comas, had been practising law in the United States since 1997 but his licence was indefinitely suspended, according to the New York Law Journal, after clients complained about him.

Over time, the truth about the Fulton chocolate factory would begin to emerge. After Nestlé had closed the plant in 2003, it had
stripped and auctioned off the equipment. After much arm-twisting, local politicians convinced the Swiss chocolate company to at least leave the county the building, in case investors wanted to get the operation rolling again. Nestlé subsequently sold the sprawling red brick factory to Oswego County for a nominal $100. Lion Capital Management bought it from the state for the same price and transferred it to the New York Chocolate and Confection Company. Soon, the owners were retrieving the chocolate-making equipment and hiring employees, filling Fulton with optimism, if not the smell of baking chocolate. The African purchasers, for their part, made the altruistic claim that the factory was for the benefit of Ivorian cocoa farmers. The whole arrangement had a kind of story-book gloss to it.

In principle, African ownership of a chocolate company made sense. Côte d'Ivoire's president said they were just trying to get some added benefit from the country's primary commodity. Financing for the factory came from taxes and levies that farmers had to pay, but profits would be returned to them. Revenue from the New York plant would allow the FRC to open schools, build water wells and improve the lives of the farmers. Meanwhile, Fulton would get exclusive access to a farm-gate price for beans, much cheaper than cocoa purchased on the open market. What could be wrong with any of this? Plenty, as Jerry Lamphere discovered.

Lamphere is a native of Fulton, who worked at the Nestlé plant for twenty-six years before it closed. He was retained by the new owners of the chocolate plant to be the manager. Lamphere was happy to get the job but even keener to start hiring back the people he had been obliged to fire for Nestlé. His happiness was short-lived.

Lamphere had seen a lot of strange things over his nearly three decades of making chocolate in upstate New York, but as the manager of New York Chocolate and Confection Company, he came up against things he couldn't quite fathom. “These were
definitely not businesspeople,” says Lamphere of the directors from Côte d'Ivoire. Or at least they were not engaged in any kind of business the fifty-two-year-old Fultonian could understand. Lamphere says that the board of NY3C was dominated by people who also served on the board of the FRC. There were only two members of Lion Capital among the directors but Lamphere says eventually the Ivorians found a way to have them removed.

In the spring of 2004, the Ivorian managers announced that money would soon start to flow into the factory. But Jerry Lamphere was struggling to keep the wolf from the door and his employees paid. He later learned that funds were coming from Côte d'Ivoire but going directly into another account—that of a company called IC Management which was owned and operated by Yalle Agbre, who just happened to be the treasurer for New York Chocolate and Confectionary Company, and one of the directors of the FRC.