…As Adeosun blocks $16.9m payment to Malami’s lawyers over Abacha loot***
Royal Dutch Shell paid a total of $4,322,742,582 (about N1.5 trillion) to the Federal Government in 2017, according to its annual payments report.
The amount is broken down as $3,197,530,557 for production entitlement, $765,526,389 in taxes, $245,769,306 in royalties and $113,916,331 in fees.
By comparison, Nigeria earned a total revenue of N10.6 trillion in 2017 from both oil and non-oil sources, according to CBN Economic Report, meaning Shell alone contributed about 15 per cent to the country’s income.
The total paid to Nigeria by Shell is the highest to any country where the international oil company operates.
The closest country to Nigeria is Malaysia, which received $4,153,062,216, followed by Norway with $3,425,577,190; Iraq, $$3,390,644,228; and Brazil, $1,569,519,784.
A further breakdown showed that Shell paid $3,197,530,557 to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC; $79,675,241 to Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC; $280,010,396 to Department of Petroleum Resources, DPR; and $765,526,389 to Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS.
The publication, tagged “Report on Payments to Governments for The Year 2017,” provides a consolidated overview of the payments to governments made by Royal Dutch Shell Plc and its subsidiary undertakings as required under the UK laws.
In the document, Shell defined the terms it used in reporting the payments.
Meanwhile, Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, has refused to approve the payment of $16.9 million fees to two lawyers for the recovery of Abacha loot worth $321 million. Adeosun also wrote a strongly-worded letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, raising objections to the payment.
Meanwhile, the recovered sum, according to online platform, TheCable, has been repatriated to Nigeria by the Swiss government, following the execution of the memorandum of understanding, MoU, between the two countries for the judicious use of the recovery.
“It is true that a request was made to the Minister of Finance for the payment to the Nigerian lawyers, but approval is another thing altogether,” a senior government official said,weekend, adding that the request had been sent back to the Ministry of Justice.
TheCable had reported that Enrico Monfrini, a Swiss lawyer hired by the Federal Government since 1999 to work on recovering Abacha loot, had finished the Luxembourg leg of the job since 2014 when Mohammed Bello Adoke was Attorney-General of the Federation. Monfrini had also been paid his fees by the Federal Government.
The recovered money was then domiciled with the attorney-general of Switzerland, pending the signing of an MoU with Nigeria to avoid the issues of accountability around previous recoveries. All that was left after the signing of the MoU was a government-to-government communication for the money to be repatriated to Nigeria.
However, Abubakar Malami, Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, had engaged the services of another set of lawyers in 2016 for a fee of about N6 billion. The Cable Newspaper Journalism Foundation, CNJF, a partner organisation to TheCable, then sent a Freedom of Information, FOI, request to Malami for a copy of the agreements reached with Monfrini for the recovery.
Citizen with additional report from Vanguard