Ethelbert Cooper, the Liberian who built a $3 billion African oil empire, is dead at 73

The phone calls that moved African resource deals for more than four decades will not be placed again. Ethelbert Julius Llewellyn Cooper, known to virtually everyone in his orbit simply as Bert, died on May 23, 2026, following a prolonged illness. He was 73 years old. He was a Liberian-born, Yale-educated dealmaker who founded one of Africa's most significant independent oil companies, restructured an iron ore industry during a civil conflict, built scholarship programmes at two Ivy League universities and received Harvard's highest cultural honour. He did all of this operating mostly from the shadows, which was exactly how he preferred it.

Cooper's career did not follow a straight line. It followed the contours of Africa's resource map, lurching from one ambitious project to the next, continent-spanning and structurally complex, always connecting capital from outside to assets on the ground inside. He was not a man who found oil and sold it. He was a man who assembled the conditions under which oil could be found, financed, developed and exported, and then moved on to the next impossible project while others were still marvelling at the last one.

The Liberian years that built the template

His career began not in oil but in iron ore. Fresh from Yale, where he graduated in 1974, he returned to Liberia and served as an adviser to the country's finance minister at an age when most of his peers were still looking for their first real job. Through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, he became the lead protagonist in the restructuring of the Lamco Joint Venture iron ore mining project, Liberia's single largest industrial undertaking. The country was sliding toward the civil war that would eventually devastate it, and the Lamco project was financially and politically complicated in ways that would have defeated most operators. Cooper navigated it.

During that same period, a separate company he controlled developed and implemented a programme to export direct reduced iron from Nigeria to European steelmakers, using Liberian iron ore as feedstock. It was an early demonstration of the integrated, cross-border, value-added thinking that would define everything he did for the next three decades. He was not interested in digging things out of the ground and shipping them raw. He wanted to process them, add value, move them through international markets and capture a larger share of the economic return for Africa. That instinct preceded the industry conversation about beneficiation by at least a generation.

Building Afren from nothing

The project most people associate with Cooper's name is Afren plc, which he co-founded in London in 2004 alongside former OPEC secretary general and Nigerian minister of petroleum Dr. Rilwanu Lukman, who brought institutional credibility and continental political access to complement Cooper's dealmaking instincts. The company was built around a proposition that was simple to state and extremely difficult to execute: international capital markets were hungry for African energy exposure, and African oil assets were chronically undervalued relative to their potential.

Afren grew rapidly. It listed on the London Stock Exchange and entered the FTSE 250 index, a milestone that few Africa-focused companies had reached. At its peak, the company was producing more than 50,000 barrels of oil per day, held assets across 12 countries in Africa and the Middle East, generated revenue of $1.6 billion in 2013 with net income of $474.8 million, and carried a market valuation approaching $3 billion. Cooper stepped away from day-to-day leadership in 2010, before the company entered its most turbulent and ultimately terminal period.

The scandal that destroyed what he built

The Afren story cannot be told honestly without the chapter that followed Cooper's operational exit, and the distinction between what he built and what others did with it matters enormously.

Osman Shahenshah, who served as Afren's chief executive, and Shahid Ullah, its chief operating officer, were each earning extraordinary compensation: £6.6 million and £3.8 million annually respectively. In 2013, shareholders rebelled over the scale of their pay packages and forced the board to cap their bonuses and benefits. Rather than accept the cuts, the two men devised a scheme to secretly replace their lost income.

They persuaded the Afren board to approve a £232 million payment to Oriental Energy Resources, one of Afren's Nigerian partner companies. Unknown to the board, Shahenshah and Ullah had a private side arrangement: they would receive 15 percent of that payment, routed through secret companies they controlled. Shahenshah received $9.2 million personally. Ullah received $7.9 million. A network of close Afren staff, internally referred to as the A Team, received a further $8.2 million. The money was used to purchase luxury properties in the British Virgin Islands and Mustique.

The payments were discovered in July 2014. Both men were fired in October 2014 for gross misconduct. Shahenshah agreed to pay $20 million in a civil settlement to Afren's administrators. The company itself could not survive the combination of the governance crisis and the oil price crash that arrived in late 2014. It defaulted on its debt, failed to raise refinancing and went into administration in July 2015. AlixPartners were appointed administrators. Afren was delisted from the London Stock Exchange on August 10, 2015. The administrators claimed the fraud had contributed to the collapse of the $2.6 billion company and pursued damages exceeding $500 million from the defendants.

The UK Serious Fraud Office opened a criminal investigation in June 2015. Both men were charged in September 2017. In October 2018, after a six-week trial at Southwark Crown Court, both were found guilty of fraud by abuse of position and money laundering by a London jury. In July 2020, the SFO issued a confiscation order of over £5.4 million against both men. Both were banned from running any UK company for 14 years, until 2032. Southwark Crown Court heard the pair had engaged in what the Insolvency Service described as a series of "cloak and dagger" transactions specifically designed to circumvent the shareholder-imposed compensation cap.

Cooper was not charged with any offence in connection with any of this. He was not implicated by the SFO investigation, the civil proceedings brought by the administrators or any other legal action arising from the Afren collapse. He had been gone from operational leadership for four years before the scheme was hatched. The conduct that destroyed the company he founded happened entirely under the watch of executives who joined after his active involvement had ended. That is the factual and legal record.

What it cost him personally is harder to quantify. Cooper had spent six years building Afren into the most visible Africa-focused independent oil company on the London market. To watch it go into administration, delisted and discredited, its name associated with fraud rather than the pioneering continental energy vision he had designed it around, was by all accounts deeply painful. He had moved on before the worst happened. He never fully moved on from what Afren had been before it collapsed.

The mining chapter running in parallel

Even as Afren was growing in the mid-2000s, Cooper was simultaneously pursuing iron ore projects across Central and West Africa through the African Iron Ore Group and International Mining and Infrastructure Corporation. He advanced the Nkout and Ntem iron ore projects in Cameroon, working to assemble integrated development models combining mining operations with rail, port, power and processing infrastructure. He assembled alliances between major Asian state-owned engineering companies, commodity buyers and financial institutions to back these projects. Some closed. Others did not. He kept assembling them regardless.

Harvard and the gallery that carries his name

Away from the resource sector, Cooper's most visible legacy may be the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He served on the Advisory Board of the Hutchins Center and on the President's Council of International Activities at Yale, where he established the university's first scholarship programme dedicated to African students. In 2015, Harvard awarded him the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, the university's highest honour for contributions to the field of African and African American studies. He was the only oil and gas executive on a list that has included Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, Toni Morrison and Barack Obama.

The gallery and the scholarship were not peripheral additions to a business career. They were expressions of the same conviction that ran through his resource work: that Africa's development required not just capital and infrastructure but institutional presence, cultural dignity and the formation of a professional class that understood itself as capable of competing on the global stage. He believed it fiercely, said it plainly and gave money to back it up.

The final assessment

NJ Ayuk, executive chairman of the African Energy Chamber, captured the loss plainly. "Bert Cooper was one of the great architects of African resource development and a firm believer in the continent's ability to compete on the global stage. His vision, determination and commitment to creating opportunities for Africans will continue to inspire future generations of industry leaders, investors and entrepreneurs across the continent."

The gallery at Harvard will keep his name. The Afren story, with all its brilliance and pain, will keep his fingerprints. The iron ore projects, the gas ventures, the scholarship students at Yale who benefited from a programme a Liberian oilman funded from across the ocean. These are the things that outlast a man.

Ethelbert Cooper is survived by his family. He was 73.