More than thirteen thousand members of the Ogale and Bille community, a group of farmers and fishermen in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, have filed claims against Shell for pollution of their habitat due to oil spills. The British law firm Leigh Day announced this on Thursday.
The lawyers collected data from 11,317 residents in the Ogale region, such as the magnitude of loss of income due to pollution of farmland. They have been filed with the High Court in the United Kingdom. With the claims already drawn up in Bille in 2015, mainly from fishermen, the group claim amounts to 13,652 persons.
Those affected are seeking compensation for and cleanup of pollution caused by 72 spills in Ogale since 1998, 55 of which since 2011. In Bille, there were 86 spills between 2011 and 2013, Leigh Day said, which killed mangrove forests and made fishing nearly impossible.
As early as 2016, the community turned to the British courts, because Shell’s headquarters (then one of the two main offices) is in the United Kingdom and it had no confidence in the judiciary in Nigeria. Shell found that the parent company cannot be held liable for damage caused by its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC, because it would not manage that subsidiary. In 2021, the British Supreme Court brushed this off the table. If a parent company has any involvement with the subsidiary – and that was the case with Shell and SPDC – it may already have a ‘duty of care’ to victims of damage caused by the subsidiary, according to the court.
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Leigh Day then began collecting the data. Matthew Renshaw, partner in Leigh Day, has visited the area about seven times in the last six months. “At first glance, you don’t see much pollution in Ogale. It is mainly in the ground. The farmers say they can harvest much less because of the pollution.” More serious is the pollution of drinking water. “They use water from wells, but the water that comes out of the tap is brown. You smell the oil.”
In a response to the group claim, Shell says it “strongly believes” it can win the lawsuit. After all, the “vast majority of the leaks related to the Bille and Ogale claims” were not caused by the negligence of Shell, the group said on Thursday, but by “illegal interference by third parties”. The group calls oil theft and illegal refining of stolen crude oil a “major source of oil pollution”. It also states that SPDC has always cleaned up “areas affected by leakages from its facilities or pipeline network” “regardless of the cause”, and “will continue to do so”.
“Shell always claims to have cleaned up everything,” Renshaw responds. “That’s what they said at Bodo.” Renshaw thus refers to one of the great successes of Leigh Day, a settlement of 70 million euros from 2015 for residents of the seriously polluted fishing village. Shell also promised a rigorous clean-up of the area, which will follow another year of delay came about. A lawsuit against Shell in the Netherlands by four Nigerian farmers also ended in a settlement. After Shell lost that case two years ago, the parties agreed on compensation of 15 million euros at the end of 2022.
“The pollution in Bodo at the time is very similar to that in Bille,” says Renshaw. “Recently I was in Bodo and I saw the progress that has been made. Cleaning complex pollution is therefore possible.”
He calls the amounts paid out a “good precedent”. But even if a settlement is reached in ‘his’ case, years of proceedings will precede it: he does not expect the first substantive hearing before 2024. “Shell will always opt for as much postponement as possible, because they are afraid of even more lawsuits due to communities in the Niger Delta suffering from pollution. And there are many of them.”
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