Can Petroleum Aid development?

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).

The World Bank is providing funding for the gas project and Bank officials do not understand why the project is stalling.

Yeboah’s article focuses on citizens’ grievances in Bonyere and the neighboring communities.  Although it is unlikely that community concerns are the main cause of the project delays, it does appear that the government still has some significant community relations issues to resolve.

Gary explains that, “too often, projects suffer from an ‘original sin’ – affected communities were not adequately consulted prior to the investment decision and had little say about how and whether these projects were developed.”

The initiative for not extracting the oil was originally proposed 20 years ago by Fundación Natura, the largest environmental organisation in Ecuador, and has since been supported by a number of environmental and indigenous groups defending the Yasuní National Park and its buffer zone, where the oilfields are located.

But there are strong supporters for drilling, like the deputy minister of non-renewable natural resources and former manager of the state oil firm Petroecuador, Carlos Pareja, and President Correa himself has talked extensively about "Plan B".

Meanwhile, the German government said it will not support the Yasuní-ITT initiative, because the precedent might be imitated by other countries. The announcement came as very bad news for the initiative.

The House of Representatives on Thursday resolved not to let the N155 billion oil block scandal involving Nigerian government officials, two multinational oil giants (Shell and Agip), and a Nigerian company (Malabu Oil and Gas) be swept under the carpet as legislators decided to investigate the shady deal.

While the House sees a scandal in the transaction, the Senate has said it would not investigate the matter unless there is a formal petition before it. Its spokesman, Eyinnaya Abaribe, in a telephone interview told PREMIUM TIMES that newspaper reports were not enough bases for the upper chamber to investigate such a monumental fraud. “Do we just wake up and start to do our work based on reports in the newspapers?”Mr. Abaribe queried

Although the area contains the world's largest tiger reserve, according to reporter Thomas Maung Shwe of Mizzima news service, ‘the Burmese regime has encouraged logging, gold mining, large scale farms and the building of factories inside’. As the scandal grew, Silver Wave denied what its own press release had announced, but conceded it would drill near the reserve.

A company this dastardly is a high risk, and to prove the point, Silver Wave's environmental impact document includes a description of the notorious Agulhas Current, which begins at the Mozambique border: ‘Compared to other western boundary currents the Agulhas Current adjacent to southern Africa's East Coast exhibits a remarkable stability.’ Huh? In reality, the Natal Pulse races down the Agulhas a half-dozen times each year, pushing 20km per day. It is one reason Durban's coastline hosts more than 50 major ship carcasses. Creating havoc further south on the Wild Coast, the Pulse contributes to the rouge waves that have sunk 1,000 more vessels in what is considered one of the world's most dangerous shipping corridors.

Daily, poisons are flared onto thousands of neighbouring residents. The Indian, coloured and African communities suffer the world's highest-ever recorded asthma rate in a school (52 per cent of kids), as Settlers Primary sits next to the country's largest paper mill (Mondi) and between two refineries: one run by Engen, Chevron and Total; and the other, called Sapref, by BP, Shell and Thebe Investments. Sapref's worst leak so far was 1.5 million litres into the Bluff Nature Reserve and adjoining residences in 2001.

In the latest showdown between western oil companies and Venezuela’s populist president, Exxon Mobil is widely seen as the loser, after the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ruled that the world’s biggest oil company would not be entitled to most of the damages it demanded after its fields were nationalised.

Despite this recent victory, PDVSA is facing some trouble. Under Chavez, the energy giant has undertaken ambitious social spending, running subsidised food distribution programmes and international aid projects as if it were a state unto itself. Critics say oil companies should not be delivering government services. And the money used for "Bolivarian" projects means the corporation has less to invest in developing new reserves; production has dropped from about 3.3m barrels per day in 1998 to about 2.25m in 2011, The Economist reported.

Like many of its South American neighbours, Venezuela has drastically reduced poverty in the past decade; the Bolivarian Republic’s poverty rate fell from 48.6 per cent in 2002 to 27.8 per cent in 2010, according to the UN Commission for Latin America's 2011 report. Inequality also declined sharply. This progress is linked to tough negotiations with foreign oil companies, so the state can have more resources to invest in local communities, Chavez’s supporters contend.

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.

Just a few miles from Rukwanzi six Congolese were killed in September 2007, shot at by the Ugandan army while they travelled in a passenger ferry from the island to the DRC shore. It was revealed last week that Heritage Oil and Gas, the British wildcat explorer founded by former mercenary Tony Buckingham, played a key role in triggering that military operation after its staff had crossed illegally into Congolese waters.

The reckless actions of a British oil company could conceivably have led to war. That it did not reflects Congolese weakness and Ugandan calculation. There were fears in Kinshasa at the time that Jean-Pierre Bemba was likely to return from Belgium with Ugandan support. Laurent Nkunda's CNDP was engaged in its strongest offensive to date in North Kivu and the old Ugandan interventionist tendency was increasingly on show.

Now the oil majors are entering the market, they are using a different argument - that the wider regional choice means they must be incentivised to invest in one country over another. When China National Offshore Oil Corporation (Cnooc) struck a deal with Tullow to develop Uganda's fields, it warned Museveni that there wasn't time to wait for Parliamentary debates over the issue - pausing now could mean Uganda losing its winning lottery ticket to Kenya or Ethiopia.

The Angolan government, led by reformed socialist strongman President Jose Eduardo dos Santos since 1979, has recently touted its oil wealth, economic growth and social stability to attract foreign investment, but avoids the topic of political repression and glaring economic disparities. Rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized the government's use of violence to silence critics, exemplified by the recent attack on the 10 activists in Luanda. "This brutal beating highlights the ongoing threat of violence that anyone speaking up for free speech in Angola faces," Muluka-Anne Miti, Amnesty International's Angola researcher, said in a statement.

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.

the most encouraging sign was not the grades on the report card, but the presence of several officials at the event including a member of parliament, the communications director from Tullow Oil, the World Bank country director for Ghana and a Deputy Minister of Energy. Although some of the officials’ comments were perfunctory and fairly predictable, their attendance at least signaled the recognition of civil society as an important stakeholder in Ghana’s oil development. 

On transparency and citizen participation, for example, the government received “B” grades. Regarding transparency, the report states, “On the positive side, Ghana’s parliament passed the long-delayed and debated petroleum revenue management bill at the beginning of March 2011. The bill is now awaiting presidential approval. While some issues were hotly debated, there was consensus from both the majority and the minority members of parliament on all the transparency provisions. Should the bill approved by parliament become law, there will be a number of important transparency provisions.”

Of particular concern is the lack of a legal framework for dealing with oil spills: “The institutional weakness in the environmental protection institutions was demonstrated during the investigation into mud spillage by Kosmos Energy.

This is the latest withdrawal of oil majors from Uganda and other 20 African countries, and is part of the growing trend of shifting away from retail and marketing to exploration and production, where returns on investments are high.

“We are reviewing our business globally and shall end up with a downstream footprint in larger markets with bigger profits because small markets are not profitable,” Kyayonka observed.

“The issue is about utilisation of capital. We have a pot of money from the shareholders and public funds from which they expect returns on their investments,” Kyayonka stated. “As managers, we have to think of where the dividends come from, and that is in exploration and production.”

The law, passed on March 2, allows oil revenue to be used as collateral for loans in a “credit enhancement” program, said Wayne Mitchell, resident representative for the fund, based in Accra, the capital. The risk of default is reduced, which will lower interest rates, he said.

A provision to keep 21 percent of the revenue in a stabilization fund for the country to fall on in times of price volatility and a heritage fund with 9 percent of earnings saved for the future is “best practice,” Mitchell said in an earlier interview on March 2.

Additionally, I'm confused about why you would criticize the Solicitor General for "tak[ing[ a 19th-Century view of international law" when that is a temporally closer (and thus, presumably more accurate) view of a law enacted in the eighteenth century.  I agree with you that this "completely ignores the entire post-World-War-II body of international human rights law," but it is rather obvious that the First Congress could not have intended to address that legal development because those events would not occur for another 150 years! 

oday, the government submitted its brief (below) - and it's on the wrong side. I have rarely been so disappointed in my government.

The government's position takes a 19th-Century view of international law, basically arguing that governments don't have any business meddling in what other nations do to their own citizens. That's ridiculous, and it completely ignores the entire post-World-War-II body of international human rights law. It's also at odds with US foreign policy, which frequently criticizes other nations - and even authorizes hostile action - based on their treatment of their own citizens.

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.

The new law will require Ghana’s government to publish a breakdown of all the oil-related money it receives and where it goes. It establishes watchdog groups to keep an eye on the oil money.

The new law will require Ghana’s government to publish a breakdown of all the oil-related money it receives and where it goes. It establishes watchdog groups to keep an eye on the oil money.

The new law will require Ghana’s government to publish a breakdown of all the oil-related money it receives and where it goes. It establishes watchdog groups to keep an eye on the oil money.

Both Tullow Oil and Kosmos Energy have posted scam alerts on their websites. Here’s the warning from Kosmos: NOTE: POTENTIAL RECRUITMENT FRAUD Kosmos Energy has learned that job applicants in the international oil and gas business, as well as other industry sectors, may be contacted by individuals or organizations that offer false employment opportunities. These communications are often via email and may request personal information or money. Kosmos only makes job offers after candidates have completed a formal interview process and does not ask applicants to pay fees during recruitment. Specifically, please note that any communications from or about the “Kosmos Group” are not associated with Kosmos Energy. This is good, but I don’t know how useful these alerts are. There are a lot of people in Takoradi who don’t have internet access. And even when you get to the Tullow or Kosmos websites, it’s not easy to get information.

When Ghanaians found out there was oil off their coast, a sense of excitement spread across the country. Optimistic and at times unrealistic statements from various company officials and ministries added to expectations.

Francis M.K. Sallah is the Regional Industrial Relations Officer for the General Transport, Petroleum and Chemical Workers’ Union. Lately he has been hearing a lot about jobs, or the lack of, in the oil industry.

The Ghanaian government says that 90% of the oil jobs should go to Ghanaians by 2020, but some people in the industry wonder why the government isn’t being more aggressive. Sallah says that right now Ghanaians could occupy more than half the posts. Welders, pipefitters, painters, maintenance people – there are plenty of skilled laborers in Ghana, so what’s keeping them from getting jobs?