What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Back in June, as you will surely recall, as part of an article on taxes, I mentioned that Timor-Leste has the world's highest taxes as a percentage of GDP, and by a wide margin at that. You will also recall that the high tax revenue came from oil projects in the Timor Sea.

Or at least, I hope you recalled that, because Transocean, the contractor behind the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that caused the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, sure did. Timor-Leste has contracted them for drilling projects off their coast, despite their own spill last year.

There's another reason Transocean likely picked Timor-Leste. According to the last paragraph of the linked article, "The capacity of East Timor to supervise these activities appears to be negligible." So that'll be fun.