Bodo Community vote for the settlement – December 2014

Leigh Day & Co press release

7 January 2015

Oil-giant Shell have agreed a compensation package of £55m to compensate 15,600 Nigerian fishermen and their community after it was devastated by two massive oil spills in the Niger Delta in 2008 and 2009.

Today’s announcement follows a three-year legal battle by the Nigerian’s lawyers, London based law firm Leigh Day, in the High Court in London following the spills which devastated the environment surrounding the community of Bodo, in Gokana Local Government Area, Rivers State, Nigeria.

Each member of the community impacted by the oil spill will each receive approximately 600,000 Nigerian Naira (£2,200) paid into their individual bank accounts over the next few weeks. The minimum wage in Nigeria is 18,000 Nigerian Naira a month and 70% of the population live below the poverty line.

The total cost of the compensation package agreed with Shell is £55m being split £35m for the individuals and £20m for the community and is thought to be one of the largest payouts to an entire community following environmental damage.

It is the first time that compensation has been paid following an oil spill in Nigeria to the thousands of individuals who have suffered loss.

Experts have confirmed that the spills destroyed thousands of hectares of mangrove, which is the largest man made disaster of this sort ever seen. In the aftermath of the spills Shell originally offered £4,000 (four thousand pounds GBP) compensation to the entire Bodo community before the villagers sought legal representation from lawyers in London, where Shell have their headquarters.

In a separate process, Shell has also pledged to clean up the Bodo Creek. These efforts have been led by Bert Ronhaar, the former Dutch Ambassador to Nigeria, who acted as mediator with the community and Shell to ensure that the creek is cleaned to international standards. It is planned that the clean up of the Creek will commence over the next two to three months.

Bodo is a fishing town. It sits in the midst of 90 sq km of mangroves swamps and channels, which are the perfect breeding ground for fish and shellfish. It is a rural coastal settlement consisting of 31,000 people who live in 35 villages. The majority of its inhabitants are subsistence fishermen and farmers.

Shell say they were informed of the first leak in early October 2008. The community says by this date oil had already been pumping into the creek for approximately six weeks. Even then it took Shell over a month to repair the weld defect in the pipeline.

The second spill occurred in December 2008 and was also the result of equipment failure. It was not capped until February 2009 during which time even greater damage was inflicted upon the creek as crude oil pumped into the rivers and creeks per day over a period of two months.

The Trans-Niger Pipeline has suffered an incidence of operational oil spills between 2006 and 2010 at a rate 133 times greater than the European average.

In 2011 Shell admitted liability for the spills but continued to dispute the amount of oil spilled and the extent of the damage caused.

Leigh Day began legal action at the High Court in March 2012 after talks broke down over compensation and a clean up package for the community.

Today’s announcement that a settlement has been reached comes ahead of a full trial, which had been planned for early 2015.

The lawyer representing the claimants, Martyn Day from Leigh Day, said:

“We came to a provisional agreement with Shell just before Christmas. I immediately then travelled out with a team of 20 to meet with our clients to see if they were happy with the deal. We were able to see 15,400 of them (98%) in 8 days.

“In the week before Christmas I personally met with around 800 clients and I don’t think I have ever seen a happier bunch of people. Every single one of the clients we met has said yes to the deal.

“Whilst we are delighted for our clients, and pleased that Shell has done the decent thing I have to say that it is deeply disappointing that Shell took six years to take this case seriously and to recognise the true extent of the damage these spills caused to the environment and to the those who rely on it for their livelihood.

“We hope that in future Shell will properly consider claims such as these from the outset and that this method of compensation, with each affected individual being compensated, will act as a template for Shell in future cases in Nigeria and in the other countries in which it operates.”

Chief Sylvester Kogbara, Chairman of the Bodo Council of Chiefs and Elders, said:

“For now, the Bodo community is very happy that this case has been finally laid to rest. The hope is that this will forge a good relationship with Shell for the future, not only with the Bodo people but with all the Niger Delta communities that have been impacted in the same way as us.

“We also hope that Shell will take their host communities seriously now and use this platform as recommended by UNEP for the clean-up of the whole of Ogoniland.

“We are thankful for the strength and perseverance of our international lawyers, Leigh Day, for their tenacity to end this case in the way that it has. We also appreciate our Nigerian lawyers for their cooperation with our international lawyers. We are thankful to all that have contributed in one way or another to the conclusion of this case such as the various NGOs, especially Amnesty International, who have come to our aid. And also NAGOND that has aided this process to come to a conclusion. We are also thankful to the media for highlighting the unprecedented damage to our environment.

“Due to the cordiality of the conclusion of this agreement with Shell, we are hopeful that the clean-up of the Bodo environment will follow suit in no distant time.”

The United Nations, Amnesty International and the Nigerian government had previously expressed deep disappointment with Shell’s lack of action in the region.

The Ogoni fishing and farming communities have accused Shell of applying different standards to clean-ups in Nigeria compared with the rest of the world.

Amnesty has previously described the oil spill investigations as ‘a fiasco’ – see https://plus.google.com/photos/+DavidStandard/albums/5919790526488221329....

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Nigeria: Long-awaited victory as Shell finally pays out £55 million over Niger Delta oil spills

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL AND THE CENTRE FOR ENVIRONMENT, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DEVELOPMENT (CEHRD) PRESS RELEASE

7 December 2014

Oil giant Shell’s long-overdue compensation pay out to a community devastated by oil spills in the Niger Delta is an important victory for the victims of corporate negligence, said Amnesty International and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development today.

Six years after two oil spills destroyed thousands of livelihoods in the Bodo area, legal action in the UK has driven Shell to make an out-of-court settlement of £55m to compensate the affected community. The £55m will be split between £35m for 15,600 individuals and £20m for the community.

“While the pay-out is a long awaited victory for the thousands of people who lost their livelihoods in Bodo, it shouldn’t have taken six years to get anything close to fair compensation,” said Audrey Gaughran, Director of Global Issues at Amnesty International.

“In effect, Shell knew that Bodo was an accident waiting to happen. It took no effective action to stop it, then it made false claims about the amount of oil that had been spilt. If Shell had not been forced to disclose this information as part of the UK legal action, the people of Bodo would have been completely swindled.”

The wait has taken its toll on Bodo residents, many of whom had their fishing and farming livelihoods destroyed in the spill. Throughout this time they have had to live with the ongoing pollution and, without compensation, many have faced grinding poverty.

“The compensation is a step towards justice for the people of Bodo, but justice will be fully achieved when Shell properly cleans up the heavily polluted creeks and swamps so that those who rely on fishing and farming for their income can begin to rebuild their livelihoods,” said Styvn Obodoekwe, Director of Programmes of the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development (CEHRD).

“I am very happy that Shell has finally taken responsibility for its action,” says Pastor Christian Kpandei, a Bodo fish farmer, whose fish farm was destroyed by the oil spill. “I’d like to thank the lawyers for compelling Shell to make this unprecedented move.”

Shell has always accepted that the two 2008 Bodo oil spills were the fault of failures on the company’s pipeline at Bodo, but publically – and repeatedly – claimed that the volume of oil spilt was approximately 4,000 barrels for both spills combined, even though the spills went on for weeks.

In 2012 Amnesty International, using an independent assessment of video footage of the first oil spill, calculated that the total amount of oil split exceeded 100,000 barrels for this spill alone.

During the legal action in the UK, Shell had to finally admit that its figures were wrong and it had underestimated the amount of oil spilt in both of the Bodo cases. However Shell has still not confirmed how much oil was actually spilt.

During the legal process Shell was also forced to reveal that it had been aware, at least since 2002, that most of its oil pipelines were old, and some sections contained “major risk and hazard”. In a 2002 document Shell stated that outright replacement of pipelines was necessary because of extensive corrosion.

As far as Amnesty International and CEHRD are aware Shell took no action despite having this information years before the Bodo leaks. An internal Shell email from 2009 revealed that Shell knew it was exposed over spills in Ogoniland – where Bodo is situated; the email stated “the pipelines in Ogoniland have not been maintained properly or integrity assessed for over 15 years”.

Thousands more people remain at risk of future oil spills because of Shell’s failure to fix its ageing and dilapidated pipelines.

“Oil pollution in the Niger Delta is one of the biggest corporate scandals of our time. Shell needs to provide proper compensation, clear up the mess and make the pipelines safer, rather than fighting a slick PR campaign to dodge all responsibility,” said Audrey Gaughran.

BACKGROUND

Two oil spills occurred at Bodo in the Niger Delta in 2008, the first in August and the second in December. Amnesty International and CEHRD have worked on the Bodo spills case since 2008, supporting the community to secure compensation and clean up.

In 2011, the people of Bodo, represented by UK law firm Leigh Day, began court proceedings in the UK against the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria.

Hundreds of oil spills from Shell’s pipelines occur every year.

Shell repeatedly blames illegal activity in the Niger Delta for most oil pollution but its claims have been discredited in research by Amnesty International and CEHRD. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AFR44/028/2013/en

For more information please call Amnesty International’s press office in London, UK, on

+44 20 7413 5566 or +44 (0) 777 847 2126
email: press [at] amnesty [dot] org

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Shell to pay over $83M US to Nigerian village due to 2008 oil spills

Thought to be one of the largest payouts to a community for environmental damage

The Associated Press (AP)

7 January 2015

Oil giant Shell has agreed to pay a Nigerian fishing community 55 million pounds (about $83.5 million US) for the worst oil spill ever suffered in Nigeria.

Wednesday’s agreement ends a three-year legal battle in Britain over two spills in 2008 that destroyed thousands of hectares of mangroves and the fish and shellfish that sustained villagers of the Bodo community in Nigeria’s southern Niger Delta.

It “is thought to be one of the largest payouts to an entire community following environmental damage,” the claimants’ London lawyers, Leigh Day, said.

Shell said it is paying 35 million pounds ($53.1 million) to 15,600 fishermen and farmers and 20 million pounds ($30.4 million) to their Bodo community.

“We’ve always wanted to compensate the community fairly,” said Mutiu Sunmonu, managing director of Shell Nigeria, which is 55 per cent owned by the Nigerian government.

Shell originally offered 4,000 pounds ($6,000) to the entire community, Leigh Day said.

Sunmonu said Shell also has agreed and is “fully committed” to a cleanup.

Chief Sylvester Kogbara, chairman of the Bodo Council of Chiefs and Elders, said he hoped “that Shell will take their host communities seriously now” and embark on a cleanup of all of Ogoniland.

Friction between villagers, Shell for decades

A U.N. Environment Program report has estimated it could take up to 30 years to fully rehabilitate Ogoniland, an area where villagers have been in conflict with Shell for decades.

Kogbara said the community money will be used to provide needed basic services. “We have no health facilities, our schools are very basic, there’s no clean water supply,” he told The Associated Press.

Individually, he said villagers are discussing setting up as petty traders and other small businesses until their environment is restored. Each person gets 2,200 pounds ($3,340) in a country where the minimum monthly wage is less than $100.

Shell’s Sunmonu insisted that oil theft and illegal refining remain “the real tragedy of the Niger Delta” and “areas that are cleaned up will simply become re-impacted.”

Amnesty International said Shell continues to blame oil theft for spills — which means it does not have to pay compensation – when the company’s own documents state its aging oil pipelines present a “major risk and hazard.”

Shell had argued that only 4,000 barrels of oil were spilled in Bodo while Amnesty International used an independent assessor who put it at over 100,000 barrels – considered the largest ever oil spill in mangroves.

“Oil pollution in the Niger Delta is one of the biggest corporate scandals of our time,” said Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International. She said thousands more people remain at risk because of Shell’s failure to fix aging and dilapidated pipelines.