Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s second largest oil company, has been put under formal investigation by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s office for “international corruption” offences relating to a deal for oil block OPL 245 in Nigeria, according to reports in the Italian press this morning. A Global Witness investigation exposed that when OPL 245 was sold in 1998 for US$20m – a fraction of its value now – it went to Malabu Oil & Gas, a company secretly owned by the then Oil Minister, Dan Etete. The block was then passed on to Shell and Eni in 2011, with the Nigerian government acting as middleman, for US$1.1bn. This sum is equivalent to 80% of the country’s 2015 health budget, but it never reached state coffers.
— source globalwitness.org | 2016