# Tony Buckingham The human connective tissue of the 1990s security-for-minerals network — and a man who has consistently denied that the network existed. A former North Sea diver who became an oil entrepreneur, Buckingham founded and ran **Heritage Oil and Gas** in London. He is described in the specialist literature as the controlling figure behind the Chelsea cluster: Heritage Oil, [[Branch Energy]], Branch Minerals, **DiamondWorks** and [[Sandline International]], sharing an address, telephone numbers and directors. His documented role in the [[Executive Outcomes]] story begins with the 1993 Soyo operation in Angola, where the recovery of oil equipment for Ranger Oil was, per Pech, negotiated by Buckingham with the former SAS officer Simon Mann, in an arrangement where the Angolan state oil company partly financed the military support. A British intelligence report attributed EO's 1993 UK registration to Buckingham and Mann. **DiamondWorks** was formed in late 1996 with Buckingham as controlling member, alongside Tim Spicer of Sandline, the group's finance chief Michael Grunberg, and — from February 1997 — EO's founder Eeben Barlow as a shareholder. DiamondWorks held six Sierra Leone diamond properties, guarded by LifeGuard Security, which was staffed with former EO personnel. **Buckingham denies corporate ties between the security and mining entities.** That denial is on the record and belongs on the page; so does the observation that the denial is difficult to reconcile with the shared directorships, the shared address, and the shared shareholdings. He went on to build Heritage Oil into a substantial independent explorer with assets in Uganda, Kurdistan and elsewhere, and became one of Britain's wealthier businessmen — a trajectory worth noting, because the private-military-and-minerals story is usually told as a story about soldiers, and its most durable beneficiary was the man arranging the financing. ## See also [[Branch Energy]] · [[Executive Outcomes]] · [[Sandline International]] · [[Security-for-Minerals]]