Oil & gas recruiter Swift Worldwide Resources has recently opened an office in Accra, Ghana and has initiated moves to set up in Iraq by the end of 2012.

Two staff members have been based in Accra for several months, Swift EMEA managing director James Allen told Recruiter. “It’s an exciting market, very buoyant, and something we’ve been watching for a while,” he said. “It’s one of the fastest growing economies worldwide at the moment, and the discovery rate is up around 70% — for every 10 wells they dig, in seven of them they find oil… It’s crying out for a company like us to go in there.”

He added: “We feel now is the right time to go in and establish ourselves. It’s already bearing some early fruit.”

Allen described the country as “very well established, very safe, very secure”.

In Iraq, the Recruiter Fast 50 company has begun the registration process for a local Iraqi operation. Once completed, Allen said Swift will open in “probably the Basra region to support some of the client work we have going on there… with a small team initially on the ground to get the ball rolling”. 

Building operations from the ground up is nothing new for Swift. Allen said: “Whatever it takes, wherever it takes us — we don’t get put off by challenging or frontier locations. In fact, that’s what we look for. They’re usually more rewarding, and they set you apart from your competition.”

In other Swift moves, its head office, staffed by chief executive Tobias Read and chief financial officer James Dymott, relocated from London to Houston, Texas, late last year. The company exited Nigeria recently, citing requirements for increasingly greater percentages of Nigerian ownership in businesses such as Swift.