Malabu: Shell writes down OPL 245 licence

Multinational oil and gas giant, Royal Dutch Shell, said it would write down its investment in the controversial Malabu Oil Prospecting Licence (OPL) 245 offshore field in Nigeria.

The OPL licence has been at the heart of a protracted litigation in Italy after prosecutors alleged corruption.

According to Reuters, Shell announced the write-down during its second-quarter 2020 earnings call during the week. The company had recorded losses in its upstream division, including a post-tax impairment charge of $4.7 billion related to write-downs of the Malabu oilfield, and assets sales in North America and Brazil.

The company also announced that its upstream division had losses of $6.7 billion, due to a seven per cent fall in production to 2.4 million barrels a day. However, adjusted earnings for the second quarter fell to $600 million compared to $3.5 billion this period last year.

Shell bought the oilfield alongside an Italian company, Eni, in 2011. Together, they paid $1.3 billion.

The payment was to a company called Malabu, which was owned by Nigeria’s former Oil Minister Dan Etete. However, Italian prosecutors claimed that most of the payments were kickbacks to Nigerian government officials.

Prosecutors have, therefore, called for an eight-year prison sentence for former Eni CEO, Paolo Scaroni. Both companies have been fined $1.04 million and prosecutors seek the confiscation of $1.092 billion from the defendants of the case