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A great deal of research provides knowledge about the activities of the incumbent firms within international oil markets. However, few scholars contribute to a better understanding of, on the one hand, smaller oil companies, and on the other hand, how firms in this industry enter and exit from one given market. This article wants to fill these gaps by depicting how an independent within the oil sector, the Irish company Tullow, entered and then left the oil sector in Uganda. To do so, it relies on a research design based on six types of empirical fingerprints including semi-structured interviews, a corpus of fifteen cable leaked through Wikileaks, corpuses of newspaper articles and hansards.