Just two days before the federal cabinet dissolved to allow President Goodluck Jonathan appoint a fresh one in recognition of his new electoral mandate, officials in charge of our oil and gas resources secretly signed a deal assigning production rights in at least two large oil blocks to a shadowy company with no prior experience and no fixed address.
Under the direction and with the approval of then petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, the officials with a magic wave of a pen effectively transferred hundreds of millions of US dollars – possibly billions – in public assets to private individuals without a public tender.
The deal is in apparent violation of Nigeria’s Public Procurement Act, which forbids no-tender bids for the procurement of goods and services by any government-owned institution under penalty of imprisonment.
The former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, has been arrested and remains in detention in part for allegedly violating the same law. Mr Bankole faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty of those particular charges.
The man at the heart of this strange and secretive deal is one Jide Omokore, chairman of a company not yet a year old and which has never produced a barrel of oil. The company, Atlantic Energy Drilling Concept Limited, is the beneficiary of this gift by Mrs Alison-Madueke. For paying to the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, a fully owned subsidiary of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (of which Mrs Alison-Madueke, as minister, was chairman) an initial “entrance fee” of slightly more than $50 million for each of the two oil fields, Atlantic now has effective control of the NPDC’s 55 percent stake in the oil block. These are rick blocks known in the industry as OML 30 and 34.
Shell, the giant multinational that produces around 50 percent of all of Nigeria’s crude, is the beneficial owner of the remaining 45 percent of the blocks. Shell had subjected its share of these oil blocks to an open and transparent competitive bidding process, fetching up to $1.3 billion in a single field. By comparison, Mrs Alison-Madueke’s no-bid approach via a so-called “Strategic Alliance Agreement” fetches the federation account an upfront cash payment of little more than $50 million. The true market value, if the Shell approach had been followed, would have been upwards of $1.5 billion.
Mrs Allison-Madueke has shut out established industry players, including local companies, by opting for these secret deals. The transcripts of these “strategic alliance” agreements can be found on our web site, 234NEXT.com.
As she campaigns furiously for reappointment into Mr Jonathan’s cabinet, whose nominees may be sent to the Senate for approval as early as this week, Mrs Alison-Madueke has become a major political burden for the president. Her presence in the new government is certain to prove a distraction to the president, who has expressed a strong determination to steer the country away from its persistent underperformance and avarice. As in the past, all attempts to reach Mrs Alison-Madueke for comment were rebuffed. She has said elsewhere that she did nothing wrong and threatens to sue us for exposing these deals.
“The question is why?” said one prominent energy sector source. “Why these particular companies and these particular individuals? Why do these deals secretly? Why deny experienced industry players the opportunity to bid for the same contracts?”
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