Following recent agreements struck with NNPC for deep-water oil production in Nigeria, four major multinational oil corporations operating in Nigeria have decided to drop their multibillion dollar litigation against the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited.
On August 22, 2022, Shell Plc, ExxonMobil Corporation, Chevron Corporation, and Equinor ASA informed two federal justices in New York of this, according to news agencies.
According to the report, the oil majors claimed they had reached a settlement with the NNPC and would end any pending legal proceedings once the new agreements went into force.
The action was taken ten days after the companies extended their production-sharing agreements with the NNPC and their leases with the Nigerian government for the permits at the center of long-running disputes over crude allocation.
In order to compel the national oil firm to repay $1 billion in alleged overpayments on Oil Mining Lease 128—the lease that contains the Agbami field—the IOCs sued NNPC in a US court in 2017.
The Nigerian subsidiaries of Statoil and Chevron had asked a federal court in New York to uphold an arbitral ruling rendered in their favor in March 2015 over their dispute with NNPC in the middle of March 2017.
According to Africa Energy Intelligence, at the time, an arbitral court located in Nigeria ordered NNPC to pay the majors about $1 billion to make up for the excess money it had made when allocating revenue from OML 128, which encloses the Agbami field (240,000 barrels per day).
The Federal High Court in Lagos issued a counter-decree in May 2015 stating that Statoil was required to pay $1.1 billion to NNPC. It was further stated that the NNPC had filed an appeal.
- Tags: #ExxonMobil, #lawsuites, #NNPC, #Shell
