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Amnesty International accuses Shell of falsifying spill reports

By BusinessNews Staff on November 9, 2013

Amnesty International says it has fresh evidence to show that oil super major, Shell, falsified and manipulated oil spill investigations and documents in Nigeria.

The rights group accused the oil company of wrongly reporting the cause and volume of pollution devastating the Niger Delta and made false claims about cleanup measures, according to a report by the Associated Press.

The future of farmers and fishermen whose livelihoods are destroyed by such spills, depends on reports that can be “very subjective, misleading and downright false,” according to an independent United States industry expert hired by Amnesty International to review documents newly obtained under Nigeria’s Freedom of Information Act.

The report offers detailed analysis to back longstanding charges that oil companies blame sabotage for spills sometimes caused by corrosion and other faults in aging pipelines. Sabotage or oil theft means a community is not eligible for compensation.

Shell Nigeria said it “firmly rejects (the) unsubstantiated assertions” and seeks “greater transparency and independent oversight” in reporting oil spills.

“Solutions to the terrible tragedy of oil pollution in the Niger Delta need to be found,” said a statement provided in response to the report, according to the Associated Press.

Shell was the first company to start producing oil in the Delta, in 1958.

Shell repeated assertions that most spills were caused by growing theft that experts estimate at between 100,000 and 200,000 barrels of oil a day.

One questionable report claiming sabotage was accepted by a Netherlands court that ruled against compensation for a Niger Delta community, Amnesty noted.

The report, prepared in collaboration with the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development, sheds new light on one of the worst environmental disasters in Nigeria, a 2008 spill that affected about 30,000 people in the Delta’s Bodo creek area, and is the subject of a lawsuit in Britain.

Some experts say the spill caused the largest loss of mangrove habitat ever caused by an oil spill.

Shell documents say the leak started on October 5, 2008 and 1,640 barrels of oil were spilled. Government and community documents say the leak started on August 28. United States-based Accufacts, the industry expert hired by Amnesty, reviewed a video of the leak and estimated that up to 4,320 barrels of oil was flooding Bodo each day for at least 72 days.

When Amnesty challenged Shell with its evidence, the company for the first time said it had turned off supply to the affected pipe, and, therefore, the volume of the spill could not be that high. Yet, the video showed oil spurting months later, on November 7.

Shell says it cleaned up the Bodo spill between October 30, 2008 and December 2009. But it also says it did not have access to the area to stop a second major spill that began on December 7, 2008.

Nigerian regulators have not certified the site as clean, as mandated by law.

Martyn Day of Leigh Day, the British law firm representing about 15,000 people from Bodo, said the Amnesty’s report “makes it now clear that Shell has a totally deficient system …that has led to a massive underestimate of how much oil has leaked out into that area.”

[Punch]

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