HEDA greatly welcomes the decision of July 20, 2018, by Milan Court hearing the OPL245 corruption case against ENI, Shell and others to grant permission for the Federal Republic of Nigeria (FRN) as a party in the proceedings.
The decision opens the way for the FRN to claim billions of dollars in damages from Shell, Eni and the individual defendants in what has been termed one of the biggest corporate corruption cases in history.
The Court overruled objections by the legal representative of one of the defendants that Nigeria was not a victim of the alleged corruption in the OPL 245 deal.
HEDA and its international partners – Global Witness, Re:Common and The CornerHouse – had themselves applied for civil party status but their applications were rejected by the court.
All of the groups have fought to expose corruption for many years and have considerable expertise in the area. However, fighting corruption is not cited as a primary activity of the groups in their Articles of Association. For this reason, the court refused to admit them.
The four NGOs have sought to become civil parties to the criminal proceedings because they were ready to support the work of the public prosecutor office of Milan and ultimately bring justice to Nigerians who suffered corrupt oil exploitation in the Niger Delta for decades.
The groups would like to thank their lawyers for the considerable work they put in to apply for civil party status and their dedication, commitment and desire to see justice was commendable.
“We will continue to monitor the court proceedings by sharing whatever information we have that is pertinent to the case.” stated Olanrewaju Suraju, Chairman of HEDA Resource Centre.
