US courts have been good to Jack Grynberg, netting him hundreds of millions of dollars in disputes with some of the world’s largest oil and gas producers since 1984.
Despite that fortune, the 83-year-old oilman says he’s fed up with America’s legal system and has taken his biggest suit yet -- a battle over profits from Kazakhstan’s most valuable oil fields -- to Switzerland.
Grynberg is suing a consortium led by BP Plc, saying the oil giant backtracked on a 1991 deal promising him 20 percent of the profits from Kazakh fields he helped find. Instead, Grynberg says in the lawsuit that BP cut him out and struck deals directly with the Kazakh government, greased with bribes paid by a CIA agent who was arrested in 2003.
