Oil firm to sack 700 workers

The Shoreline Group, a Nigerian oil producer, has halted plans to issue $500m worth of Eurobonds and will sack 700 of its employees amid the sustained drop in global oil prices, the Chief Executive Officer of the firm, Mr. Kola Karim, has said.

In the middle of last year, Shoreline executives went on a two-week roadshow to the United States and the Middle East to discuss a debut issue of five to seven-year debt to buy oil and gas assets across Africa.

Now, with Brent crude trading below $30 per barrel and the Central Bank of Nigeria imposing restrictions on the amount of dollars businesses can obtain, Shoreline plans to cut 35 per cent of its nearly 2,000 workers to survive the “tough” conditions, Karim said in a January 19 interview with Bloomberg in his office in Lagos.

“We went on a roadshow and the world of oil collapsed. We’re going to wait until the end of the first quarter and see how stable the markets are. Mid-last year, our projections were $60 oil for the next five years,” he said.

Shoreline is one of several local businesses that bought fields in the oil-rich Niger Delta region after foreign companies, including Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SA and Eni SpA, sold onshore assets.

[Punch]

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