Business
Bonga Oil Spill: Shell To Pay Bodo £55m Compensation
Six years after two oil
spills destroyed thousands of livelihoods in Bodo area of Ogoniland, in Nigeria’s Rivers State, legal action in the United Kingdom has driven Shell to make an out-of-court settlement of £55m to Compensate the affected community.
Amnesty International (A1) and the Centre for Environment, Human Rights and Development said, Wednesday, that the decision of Shell to pay the long -overdue compensation represents an important victory for the victims of corporate negligence.
The Director of Global Issues of Amnesty International, Audrey Gaughran, said while the payout was long overdue and awaited victory for thousands of people who lost their livelihoods in Bodo, it should not have taken six years to set anything close to fair compensation.
He said Shell in effect knew that Bodo was an accident waiting to happen even as it took no action effective enough to stop it while making false claims about the amount of oil that had been spilt.
According to him, if Shell had not been forced to disclose this information as part of the UK legal action, the people of Bodo would have been completely swindled.
He said the long wait have taken toll on Bodo residents many of whom had their livelihood of fishing and farming destroyed in the oil spills.
Gaughran further explained that the people had to live with the pollution without compensation in the face of grinding poverty.