Nigeria will earn about $10billion investment from the resolution of the Oil Mining Lease (OML) 245 block popularly known as Malabo litigation.
Minister of State of Petroleum Resources, Senator Heineken Lokpobiri said: “If we resolve the issue around OML 245, it will attract investments between $5billion and $10billion. It will change the story.”
He explained that the oil block which has the highest number of deposit “has been tied down for 28 years, saying: “What we are trying to do is to resolve the issue and attract investment to Nigeria.”
But, according to him, should Nigeria fail to attract investment to its crude oil deposit between 2024 and 2025, it will become useless.
“The whole world is going towards abandoning fossil fuel. And the whole world is talking about reducing investments in fossil fuel.
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“And the President in his wisdom having vested me with the responsibility of overseeing oil, I have the responsibility to ensure that we attract all the investments we can as a country. Any investment we cannot get between 2024 and 2025, forget it,” he said.
He spoke in Abuja, while debunking an online publication that after an agreement was signed on the case he went to Paris to meet Mr. President.
He said: “Two issues that I want to straighten is that the Gazette publication was a compendium of lies and I think that was journalism at the lowest level.
“There is no agreement signed. If you look that publication, it said an agreement was signed and after that agreement was signed some people went to Paris to meet Mr. President.
“No agreement has been drawn up and signed by parties.
“There is no agreement that is signed as at today. No agreement is signed. We are still discussing.”
He said Nigeria’s capex (capital expenditure) of five per cent to reserve is the lowest in the world.
Warning about the imminent decline in the value of fossil fuel, he said: “If we do not do whatever we can to attract investments the crude oil deposit we have here will be a souvenir for you and I that will translate to nothing in the next few years.”
He added that it is his responsibility to attract sufficient investment into the country.
One of the measures of attracting the investment is the resolution of the Malabo case, according to the minister.
He noted that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu thus assigned him, the Attorney-General of the Federation, stakeholders as the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to resolve the Malabo matter.
Eni, according to the minister, has also sued Nigeria in court asking for $2billion.
But Nigeria wants to take out the cases that have not yielded it any positive results.
Lokpobiri said: “Now this President because of his vast experience and because of the way we find ourselves in the comity of nations producing oil, the President in his wisdom directed we should resolve the problems around OML 245.
“And he directed that the Attorney-General of the Federation, myself, and other stakeholders to resolve the problem.”
The minister insisted that the meeting in London was the first meeting, adding that “There have been meetings in Netherland, meetings in the UK before this one.”
In all these meeting, he said no agreement has been reached as alleged in the online publication.
Lokpobiri recalled that the block was originally allocated to the oil firm Malabo by the late Gen. Sani Abacha regime but former President Olusegun Obasanjo revoked it and awarded it to Shell.
According to him, Shell invested in the block while Malabo went to court and won the case. He added that Shell went on appeal because it knew the facility is very strategic to the Nigeria economy.
He noted that Obasanjo who started the process of resolving the matter in court could not accomplish it before President Umar Yar’Adua took over.
The case, he said, lingered till date.
He noted that eventually there was no way Malabo and Shell could resolve the case on the same table.
Narrating the Malabo matter, the minister said: “So what the Federal Government did was to act as soon intermediary between Malabo and Shell.
“What was the agreement? The agreement was that Malabo give up all your interest in OML 245 to Federal Government.
“The Federal Government will give this block to Shell Eni and the consideration was to give $1.1billion to Shell.”
And so Shell Eni raised the money, gave to the Federal Government, the Federal Government passed it on to Malabo.
“Malabo wrote all the documentation and said we are relinquishing all our rights in this block to the Federal Government and the Federal Government in turn passed it over to Shell Eni.
“That was the summary of that oil block. And that oil block was one of the most prolific oil blocks in the country. And so there have been multiple litigations around that oil block in different parts of the world: in Europe, in Canada, in Nigeria.
And it is also important for us to state that in all the cases that have come in different courts we have lost.
“The truth of the matter is that there was no criminal liability on the side of the Federal government or on the side of anybody.
But some people for some political reasons went to court in Switzerland and UK and in all the cases we lost.”
He said in the bid to resolve crises in the industry the crisis between NNPC/Seplat is 98per cent resolved.
Asked to give an update on the Port Harcourt Refinery, Lokpobiri noted that mechanical aspect of the refinery has been completed.
He said: “They are still test running. But I believe very soon. Yesterday (Tuesday) the MD of Port Harcourt Refinery was here because I had to ask him what is going on. And I believe very soon we will take you there. And I believe very soon products will start coming from there.”
On Warri refinery, Lokpobiri said the facility rehabilitation is at its peak.
“Warri Refinery is also on top gear. And if you ask me, in the next few months we will have tremendous increase in our refining capacity. I was reading a report that said if we refine our crude oil here we will have 18 times more in terms of value addition,” he said.