Whodunnit?

A strange theft of oil and gas secrets.

When Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, announced recently that it had found vast new oil and gas fields in the deep waters off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, pulses were quickened around the world. If all is as declared, these are the discoveries of the century.

But the excitement may have exceeded normal bounds. The federal police were called in earlier this month to investigate the mysterious theft of four laptops and two hard disks from a container. The equipment apparently contained the results of tests conducted for Petrobras close to the new gas field by Halliburton, an oil-services firm. The theft occurred in the week after January 18th, while the container was travelling by sea from the port of Santos to Macaé in Rio de Janeiro state.

Neither Halliburton nor Petrobras has said much about it. This may reflect their embarrassment. It seems odd that commercially-sensitive information should be transported in the same way as soya beans; odder that the thieves apparently knew exactly where to find what they wanted. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said that the incident bears the signs of industrial espionage.

If so, who might gain? Maybe investors looking to buy or to short Petrobras shares, or perhaps a rival oil company. At the moment it is not clear precisely what lies beneath the salt crust under the sea bed in the deep waters off Rio state. There may be as many as 70 billion-100 billion barrels of oil and much gas there. Or maybe not.

The cost of developing the fields is unknown and the technology to do so has not been proven. Anyone able to make winning bets on equities on the basis of a container-load of seismic data should probably be congratulated. But a company bidding for the right to explore near to the newly-discovered fields might find the data very useful.

Or, of course, the theft might just have been a fluke. Things frequently go missing from containers that pass through Santos. Brazil's biggest port is badly run, congested and corrupt. But if the thieves really did not know what they had stolen at the end of January, they certainly do now.