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NNPC General Managing Director Dr. Mohammed Barkindo was interested in doing something on climate change in preparation for the climate change summit in Copenhagen December 6-18. Barkindo was spread pretty thin so Shell will ask him how they can help him prepare for the summit.

She said it would be helpful if the Embassy would continue to deliver low-level messages of concern. In particular, she thought it would be helpful for the Embassy to call on Speaker of the House Dimeji Bankoke to see where he stood on the bill. Beyond that, she would like to keep the Embassy in reserve and use it as a “silver bullet” if the PIB passes the House. The Ambassador noted that the U.S., U.K., Dutch and Qthe House. The Ambassador noted that the U.S., U.K., Dutch and French Embassies had already made a joint call on NNPC General Managing Director Dr. Mohammed Barkindo.

Pickard said Shell had good sources to show that their data had been sent to both China and Russia. She said the GON had forgotten that Shell had seconded people to all the relevant ministries and that Shell consequently had access to everything that was being done in those ministries.

Standing between Shell and its prize was Dan Etete, whose company acquired the rights to OPL 245 for a tiny sum while he was oil minister of Nigeria. He was later convicted of money laundering in a different case. Shell and the Italian oil company ENI eventually acquired OPL 245 in 2011 - by paying $1.3bn to the Nigerian government. That's more than the entire health budget of Nigeria but it didn't get spent on public services.

The government promptly passed on more than $1bn of the money to a company called Malabu, which was controlled by Dan Etete. Emails obtained by anti-corruption charities Global Witness and Finance Uncovered, and seen by the BBC, show that Shell representatives were negotiating with Etete for a year before the deal was finalised.

Shell also had good reason to suspect that hundreds of millions would end up in the pockets of Nigerian politicians including the former President Goodluck Jonathan.In an email from July, the same Shell employee says Etete's negotiating strategy is "clearly an attempt to deliver significant revenues to GLJ [Goodluck Jonathan] as part of any transaction."

In its bid to take control of one of the most lucrative oil fields in Nigeria, OPL 245, oil giant, Shell, ably assisted by senior Nigerian officials, condoned illegalities, subverted laid down rules and then lied repeatedly to cover its track, an ongoing PREMIUM TIMES investigation has shown.

Further investigations by PREMIUM TIMES have however shown that 10 years before Shell made the controversial payment in 2011, the oil giant had tolerated illegalities committed by Malabu and colluded with the company in compromising Nigerian officials and subverting the regulations and guidelines under which the oil block was awarded.

Fully aware of the huge reserve OPL 245 holds, Mr. Etete and Mohammed Sani (Abacha) used executive fiat to discretionally award the block to themselves, through Malabu, a company they hurriedly cobbled together. Mr. Etete was petroleum minister at the time while General Sani Abacha, Mohammed’s father, was Nigeria’s head of state. To conceal the fact that he awarded the block to himself and shield himself from public scrutiny, Mr. Etete designed an ingenious scheme. He created a fictional character, Kweku Amafegha, and made him one of the three shareholders of Malabu, the others being Mr. Abacha and Hassan Hindu (wife of Hassan Adamu, former Nigerian Ambassador to the UK, who is popularly known as Wakili Adamawa).

At a parliamentary hearing in the Netherlands last week, Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth, Nigerian and British activists, Dutch MPs and others accused the company of breaches of safety, human rights abuses, destroying lives and the environment, hiding information, gas flaring and blaming locals for oil pollution in Nigeria.

Shell Holland's president, Peter de Wit, denied all the charges and insisted that the company applied "global standards" to its operations around the world. He argued that Shell had provided thousands of well-paid jobs, brought know-how, education and technology and had launched numerous community projects in the west African nation.

The UN Environment Programme, using money from Shell, has spent four years investigating and assessing thousands of oil spills in Ogoniland, the small oil-rich region of the Niger Delta where the company was active until forced out over pollution by Ogoni leaders including Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the Nigerian military regime in 1995.The UN report will not say who caused the spills but will confirm that large areas of land remain polluted, drinking water wells are still highly toxic and many of the fishing creeks are unproductive.

According him, what Shell is doing, is merely restructuring its port folio by divesting from small oil fields, which he noted was not a strange practice globally,

But now, under these circumstances, Shell Oil claims it is not a person, subject to human law, but an entity possessing corporate immunities.

When Shell Oil walked into the U.S. Supreme Court building, this week, claiming that it is not responsible for the torture and murder of Nigerians in its oil fields in the Niger River Delta, the Dutch corporation had a friend in the courtroom: the Obama administration.

“The intention is to determine the state of our facilities since we suspended operations in the area in 1993, and determine how best to decommission them,” the head of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), Mutiu Sunmonu, said in a statement.

“If the purpose is to clean the spills, they are welcome but UNEP should supervise the exercise… The problem we have with Shell is that it is not socially responsible,” said Wiwa, an activist with the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People.

Once this surge in U.S. energy production was linked to a predicted boom in energy from Canada’s tar sands reserves, the results seemed obvious and uncontestable.  “North America,” he announced, “is becoming the new Middle East.”  Many other analysts have elaborated similarly on this rosy scenario, which now provides the foundation for Mitt Romney’s plan to achieve “energy independence” by 2020.

Perhaps the most notable example of this was Shell Oil’s costly failure to commence test drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.  After investing $4.5 billion and years of preparation, Shell was poised to drill five test wells this summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Alaska’s northern and northwestern coasts.  However, on September 17th, a series of accidents and mishaps forced the company to announce that it would suspend operations until next summer — the only time when those waters are largely free of pack ice and so it is safer to drill.

Only after promising to take immensely costly protective measures and winning the support of the Obama administration — fearful of appearing to block “job creation” or “energy independence” during a presidential campaign — did the company obtain the necessary permits to proceed.  But some lawsuits remain in play and, with this latest delay, Shell’s opponents will have added time and ammunition.

We do not really know when this oil spill happened. It seems to have occurred over a week now. Although Shell is claiming it was as a result of sabotage, we know the company is lying again. What we know is that Shell was working on its pipeline and it was as a result of that work that this spill occurred. They were flushing the pipeline from Well 3 and that was the cause.

Shell had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule the company can’t be sued by Nigerians seeking damages for torture and murders committed by the national government in the early 1990s. With a U.S. government brief that supports Shell’s position, where does this leave Nigerians? The U.S. brief suggests that the Nigerians should seek redress in their own courts, as the human rights abuses occurred in Nigeria and not the U.S. This is a chilling message.

Malabu then sued the government. After much legal wrangling, they reached a deal in 2006 that reinstated the firm as the block’s owner. This caught Shell unawares, even though it had conducted extensive due diligence and had a keen understanding of the Nigerian operating climate thanks to its long and often bumpy history in the country. It responded by launching various legal actions, including taking the government to the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Tom Mayne of Global Witness, an NGO, has followed the case closely; he believes things were structured this way so that Shell and ENI could obscure their deal with Malabu by inserting a layer between them. Mr Agaev, Malabu’s former fixer, lends weight to this interpretation. It was, he says, structured to be a “safe-sex transaction”, with the government acting as a “condom” between the buyers and seller.

Shell and ENI reject the suggestion that their joint purchase was a thinly disguised transaction with a dodgy brass-plate company. Shell says it made payments to the Nigerian government only and that it has acted at all times in accordance with Nigerian law. It previously said it had “not acted in any way that is outside normal global industry practice”. ENI says its payments to the government “were made in a transparent manner through an escrow arrangement with a major international bank”. That bank was JPMorgan Chase. A Lebanese bank had earlier declined to handle the payments, it emerged in court.

The document outlined a key PR tactic of divide and rule, where Shell would work with some of its critics but isolate the others. Under the ”Occupying New Ground” scenario the document outlined how the company wanted to “Create coalitions, isolate the opposition and shift the debate.” The company would “Prepare a game plan for those NGOs considered key” and emphasised the need to “work with [and] sway ‘middle of the road’ activists”. Others who offered the “possibility of beginning to build trust and understanding” included Pax Christi, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Differentiating the interest groups into friends and foes, Amnesty was singled out as one NGO to approach for a dialogue.

This new evidence reveals that Shell’s cooperation with Amnesty – that would last a decade – was a part of a plan to seek “third party endorsement” for its operations in Nigeria. Getting third parties to endorse you is another classic PR tactic that Shell employed.

To improve its green image, the company had to counter accusations of “environmental devastation”, so Shell planned to produce a video “to publicise successes” and “to turn the negative tide”. The most important topic to be included in the film was “oil spills generally, focusing on sabotage.”

The company's "crisis plan" focused on what the documents refer to as "the message" and getting the "style, tone, content and timing right, reflecting greater humanity". Philip Watts, who would later become Shell chairman, emphasised that everyone must "sing to the same 'hymn sheet'."

Dividing NGOs into friends and foes, Shell emphasised the need to "work with [and] sway 'middle of the road' activists". The Body Shop, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were seen as unlikely to change their position. One suggested tactic to counter these organisations was to "challenge [the] basis on which they continue their campaign against Shell in order to make it more difficult for them to sustain it". Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were seen as more easily persuaded. The document suggests building relationships with the organisations and encouraging "buy-in to the complexity of the issue".

In particular they wanted to "build a relationship" with journalist Hilary Andersson, who had recently become the BBC's Lagos correspondent, as well as "any of her known contacts in the divisions".

The less attractive possibility is that there is much more money to be made by Shell on a global basis by stemming oil flow from Nigeria than in keeping it flowing.

The oil giant Shell has lost its appeal against a ruling that it is not the rightful owner of land where it runs Nigeria’s biggest oil export terminal.

A FEDERAL High Court, yesterday, awarded N15.4billion as special and punitive damages against Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited, SPDC, in favour of Ejama-Ebubu community in Tai Eleme Local Government Area of Rivers State for an oil spill that occurred in 1970.

Justice Buba in his judgment said: “This is a 2001 matter that has a chequered history. The plaintiffs by their paragraph 32 of the amended statement of claims, jointly and severally claimed against the defendants, special damages of N1.772billion, allowing for interest for delayed payment for five years from 1996 at a modest mean Central Bank of Nigeria deregulated rate for that volume at 25 per cent per annum, totaling N5.4billion.

Three years ago, a lower court said the oil firm should pay rent to the local community for Bonny Terminal, but Shell says it bought the land outright.

"Justice Ekembi Eko upheld that [original] judgement and said that Shell failed to convince the court that they have the certificate of occupancy on the land," Reuters news agency quotes Emmanuel Asido, one of the lawyers representing the community elders, as saying.