For negligence in oil exploration activities, the Federal High Court in Abuja has awarded N81.9bn cumulative damages against Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited and its joint venture partner, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation.
In its ruling on Monday, Justice Taiwo Taiwo ordered the payment of the judgement sum within 14 days, after which eight per cent interest would accrue to the principal sum yearly.
Delivering the judgement, the court said the amount should be paid to the oil communities in Ibeno Council of Akwa Ibom State.
The judge held that Mobil and NNPC were negligent in the manner they handled oil spills that caused severe environmental degradation in the communities.
Taiwo particularly slammed the NNPC for its interest only in the golden egg while abandoning the goose that lays the egg – the communities and their livelihoods.
The oral and documentary evidence the plaintiffs submitted to support their claims that their lives were made miserable when their water and land were polluted through crude leakages from rusty oil pipelines were admitted by the court. But it said the ones Mobil and NNPC tendered were not helpful to the court, as they were targeted at serving predetermined interests.
It said the plaintiffs proved their case well for the court to consider their reliefs, noting that Mobil claimed that it cleaned up impacted environment, but failed to address compensation that would have mitigated the economic losses of fishermen and farmers.
The judge described witnesses called by Mobil as “unreliable,” adding that they became evasive without reasonable justification during cross-examination by counsel to the plaintiffs.
He advised professionals being summoned to testify in court to be sincere, stressing that the court was expected to learn from them in their area of specialty.
The judge further said some of the witnesses ought not to have come to the court at all, going by the discrepancies in the documents brought to court, adding that they only embarked on an unreliable guess research.
The court further held that Mobil and NNPC failed to visit locations of oil leakages that led to the contamination of rivers, water bodies and creeks.
It also rejected NNPC’s claims that the suit was statute-barred in 2012 when the plaintiffs filed it.
Citing section 11, subsection 5 of the Oil Pipelines Act, he explained that the law makes it mandatory for oil companies to monitor and fix their pipelines to avoid spillages and environmental degradation.
Consequently, he awarded N42.8bn as damages for intangible losses, N21.9bn for special damages as annotated, and N10bn as general damages.
Obong Effiong Archianga and nine others led the Ibeno communities in the suit instituted through their counsel, Chief Lucius Nwosu, against NNPC, Mobil and ExxonMobil Corporation seeking N100bn compensation for economic losses suffered from oil spillages caused by the defendants’ exploration activities.
