The FCPA Blog: Tuesday, May 9, 2017 at 7:28AM:
Tom Fox recently wrote a post for the FCPA Blog about allegations that Shell made a £1.1 billion ($1.42 billion) payment for an oil field license in Nigeria, with half the money ending up in a company owned by a Nigerian government official.
Having initially denied any wrongdoing, incriminating emails leaked to the staff at advocacy group Global Witness prompted Shell to claim there was a commercial impasse that could only be breached by their dealing with the company concerned.
Maintaining its innocence, Shell stated that it had done nothing wrong and this was a matter for the Nigerian government over how it chose to apportion the license fee.
Whether these payments amount to corruption by a major oil company remains to be seen. What is clear is that this is precisely the sort of development that I have commented upon and predicted previously, when considering the SEC Rule, repealed by the U.S. Senate in February of this year.
The Extractive Industries Disclosure Rule — adopted in 2012 and finalized in 2016 — was intended to force those companies in the industry to disclose any payments over $100,000 made to foreign governments. The rule was set to go into effect in 2018.
My concerns about its repeal were simple. Energy companies might recommence the sort of under-the-table-payments that many in law enforcement had fought to prevent, and that we hoped had been substantially confined to a darker past. The Shell/Nigeria story seems a classic case in point and indicative of the type of situations we could be returning to with much greater frequency with the abandonment of the SEC rule.
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Martin Kenney is Managing Partner of Martin Kenney & Co., Solicitors, a specialist investigative and asset recovery practice based in the BVI and focused on multi-jurisdictional fraud and grand corruption cases.
Website: www.martinkenney.com |@MKSolicitors.
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