The multi-billion-dollar project, led by Royal Dutch Shell, has also been accused of inflicting large-scale damage on Sakhalin’s ecosystem, including illegal deforestation, the dumping of toxic waste, and soil erosion.

CALLS ARE growing in Britain for a wide-ranging inquiry to establish the full extent of undercover police operations within protest movements, following the unmasking of a covert officer who had spent time with several campaigns in Ireland, including the Corrib Gas protest.

PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan Police officer who infiltrated several environmental and anti-capitalist campaigns in Britain and several other European countries after he adopted the fake identity of Mark Stone in 2003, visited Ireland on several occasions.

A Federal High Court sitting in Lagos on Thursday adjourned till February 3 further hearing in the suit filed by a Lagos-based arms dealer, Gabriel Akinluyi, against Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC).

Mr Akinluyi had in 1994 sued SPDC over an alleged breach of contract on arms deal. The plaintiff, who also joined XM Federal Ltd and one Mr V. Oteri in the suit, wants the defendants to pay him the sum of $2 million (about N300 million) for the services he rendered.

As part of the recent storm around the release by Wikileaks of thousands upon thousands of US diplomatic cables, a report from the US ambassador to Nigeria has been prominent. The cable concerned the oil industry in that country, and specifically referred to discussions with Ann Pickard of Shell, the dominant player in the Nigerian oil industry. Pickard, then Shell’s vice-president for sub-Saharan Africa, where she ‘sought to share intelligence with the US government on militant activity and business competition in the contested Niger Delta’.