Italy prosecutors are demanding penalties varying from fines to jail terms for former and current officials of oil supermajors, Eni and Shell including Eni’s CEO Claudio Descalzi, fingered in the $1.3 billion Malabu scandal, one of the industry’s biggest alleged frauds, Reuters said on Tuesday.
They claimed the two oil and gas firms were in the know that roughly $1.1 billion of the $1.3 billion they paid for a Nigerian oilfield in 2011 would be offered as bribes to politicians and middlemen.
On Tuesday, at court proceedings in Milan, the lawyers requested an imprisonment of eight years for Descalzi, and seven years and four months for Shell’s one-time upstream head, Malcolm Brinded.
In the same vein, they wanted Shell and Eni to be fined 900,000 euros ($1.04 million) apiece while seeking to confiscate a cumulative sum of $1.092 billion from all the defendants in the suit, translating to all the kickbacks that exchanged hands during the transaction.
All the respondents have denied involvement in the crime, noting that the purchase payment was made into an official Nigerian government account with all subsequent transfers thereafter beyond their control.
Read also: $1.3bn oil deal: Italian, Dutch prosecutors probe Shell
Eni said the prosecutors’ demand was baseless. “Eni is confident that the truth will ultimately be established” when the defence presents its case in September, a statement by the company said.
Shell stated in a document there were no grounds to convict it or its former employees. “There is no place for bribery or corruption in our company,” it said.
Shell had mentioned the 2011 deal was a resolution of a prolonged legal tussle coming in the wake of an initial award of the block by the Nigerian government to Shell and Malabu, owned by one-time Minister of Petroleum, Dan Etete.
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