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But a Shell Nigeria spokesman, Mr. Precious Okolobo, said the company accepted responsibility for the two deeply regrettable operational spills in Bodo and was fully committed to ensuring clean-up but that since 2015, the Bodo community of Rivers State has failed to permit access by contractors appointed to carry out the clean-up.

Chairperson of BMI, Inemo Samiama, to whom Holtzman addressed the letter, said in a statement that BMI had carried out Shoreline Clean-up Assessment Technique (SCAT) as recommended by the UNEP representative in the BMI, Dr. David Little, so as to form judgments on the best remedial methods applicable to each grid at individual sites. According to Samiama, the results of the pre-SCAT and main SCAT as issued by the SCAT team leader, Dr. Erich Gundlach, had confirmed areas of pollution and the need for clean-up but the results did not raise new concerns because they were not different from existing observations from earlier reports.

Shell had accepted liability for the 2008 and 2009 oil spills, and in 2015, agreed to pay £55m to the Bodo community for losses caused by the spills. UNEP had in 2011 published a damning report anticipating that it would take up to 30 years to clean the Niger Delta from oil spills, caused by theft and operational failures.