It would appear that the mud being flung around in Italy is now landing on Nigerian government officials. Who will tell the President?
There have been further developments on Itail oil company Eni's roforofo fight, which was reported on September 28 by SaharaReporters. With a damning interview published in the October 7 edition of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, another of the accused, a 42 year old Sicilian and former Eni executive Vincenzo Armanna entered the fray. Mr. Armanna, who until recently had been a high ranking Eni executive, claimed that Eni had used a middleman in a conspiracy to return $50 million in bribes to Eni executives from the payment that Eni was proposing to make directly to Malabu to acquire an interest in OPL 245. According to Mr, Armanna, (who should know as he was the manager who handled the OPL 245 negotiations in the beginning) the $50 million was part of the $200 million commission that was to be loaded on top of the purchase price that was agreed with Malabu. This $200 million was to form part of the $1.3 billion that Eni was initially going to pay Malabu through the middleman and, co-accused, Emeka Obi. Mr. Obi was to retain the $200 million as commission which was to be shared with Eni executives and others and, transfer $1.1 billion to Etete and Malabu.
To put things in context, this initial plan to buy directly from Malabu, which we shall call Plan A was, apparently abandoned when Mohammed Abacha, alleged that he was the original owner of Malabu who had been unlawfully deprived of his shares by Etete. A Plan B was subsequently drawn up to buy OPL 245 using the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) as “obligor” with Malabu “surrendering” the licence to the FGN who would then transfer it to Shell and Eni. The FGN would in turn collect the $1.3 billion from Shell and Eni and transfer $1.1 billion to Malabu. As a consequence of plan B, Emeka Obi who was deprived of the $200 million commission, sued Malabu in a UK court and the details of the murky deal were released into the public domain and the rest as they say is history and the Italian Prosecutor began an investigation into Eni’s acquisition of OPL 245.
The La Repubblica article proposed to answer the questions: who were those designated to benefit from the $200 million commission; who were those at the top of Eni who designed and approved a plan to pay a suspiciously excessive commission to a middleman of unknown pedigree and who did not have a valid mandate to sell; why did Eni have to resort to using a middleman when they already had direct access to Malabu; who has hitherto been lying about the details surrounding the $1.3 billion dollar acquisition of OPL 245 by Shell and Eni. Mr. Armanna sought to answer these questions in his interview and set the record straight.
The article began by describing how on 30 July 2014, Mr. Armanna, accompanied by his lawyer Fabrizio Siggia, voluntarily slipped into one of the offices at the Palace of Justice in Milan, where, for eleven hours, he answered questions from prosecutors Fabio De Pasquale, Eugenio Fusco and Sergio Spadaro, the three magistrates who were investigating Armanna for international bribery along with Paolo Scaroni (former CEO of Eni), Claudio Descalzi (current CEO of Eni), Roberto Casula (former Vice-President Eni for Africa and now head of development and operations), Luigi Bisignani, the financier Gianluca Di Nardo, the middleman Emeka Obi and, former Nigerian Minister of oil Dan Etete. The article reported that since that fateful day, Armanna disappeared together with the secrets of his interrogation report. And from that day onwards, his name and, his "truth" have become a nightmare for the old and the new leadership of Eni.
The article described how Armanna met with the journalists at a table in a deserted bar, and started of by protesting that, "Eni have tried and are trying to destroy my reputation, my professional history. And I read with disbelief what Descalzi saw fit to tell to your Gad Lerner. Yet, in Eni I have been a member of the board of directors of several subsidiaries, in Congo, Uganda, Qatar and, Saudi Arabia, not to mention my work in Iran. But I'm not afraid. I'm not a loser. Nor, as you see am I going to hide. Everyone is free to believe me or not, but as I told the truth to the magistrates, so I'll tell you."
Armanna’s version of the truth was reported in the article which noted that Armanna arrived in Nigeria in 2009, as a "senior advisor" of the "Nigerian Agip Oil Company," a director of the" Nigerian LNG "and vice president of upstream activities of sub-Saharan Eni. His reputation as a trained professional preceded him, but, also, as friends of his still in Eni said of him, "a man unwilling to go along with the chain of command if something does not convince him.”
Armanna would appear to have provided an account of the genesis of the OPL 245 deal which exonerated him of any wrongdoing. The article reported that Armanna alleged that in December 2009, in his office in Abuja, Chief Akinmade, a Nigerian former head of "Nigerian Agip Oil Company" and former assistant to the minister of oil Dan Etete, showed up with a proposal for the sale of 40 percent of the reservoir OPL245 for $ 1 billion. Akinmade claimed to be acting for and on behalf of Etete, who Armanna described as a man of extraordinary ferocity and equally extraordinary corruption and, an old "friend" of Eni, with whom Eni had previously entered into negotiations for OPL245 in 2007.
Armanna claimed that he referred the offer by Akinmade to the Italian head, Roberto Casula, who he described as a man of Descalzi and, executive vice president of Eni and, chairman of the "Nigerian Agip Exploration" and thus one of the key figures in the E&P (Exploration and Production). Eni had assessed that OPL245 was a bountiful offering with a deposit estimated at between 3 and 4 billion barrels.
Armanna then goes on to describe what the considered to be the first oddity in the deal. He claimed that, after four days from receipt of the first offer via e-mail, another offer identical to that of Akinmade, arrived from Emeka Obi. Obi claimed to operate through the company "Eleda Partners" and added that he had an exclusive mandate from both Dan Etete, and Malabu the company that was supposedly the licensee of the field. On 24 December 2009, Roberto Casula, Executive Vice President of Eni, sent a letter expressing Eni’s interest in Obi’s proposal. At this point in the interview, Armanna cast aspersions on Eni and its top management for sending the letter and initiating discussions with Obi in a deal that would supposedly yield a $200 million commission without first establishing that Obi was actually entitled to act on behalf of Dan Etete and Malabu.
Armanna provided a chronology which suported his claim that Eni began discussions with Obi before Obi had been officially engaged by Etete. According to Armanna, in the last week of December 2009 he sought to establish that Obi was duly authorised to act for Etete and Malabu by going to Lagos to meet with Etete at Etete’s “villa along the river”. Armanna recalled that he “came out of an armored car escorted by a pickup with three of our men from Eni armed security”. Etete who was in the company of Obi then led Armanna into the “garden of the villa”, going through “an arch formed by two bloated and carved elephant tusks. Armanna further recalled that, “We passed in front of a temple of marble, until we reached a cage with two lions. At that point, the former Minister turned to me with a smile and, pointing to the two beasts, said, “This is where my enemies end”. I confess that it appeared together ridiculous and threatening, if only because the man is accused of exterminating ethnic minorities who claimed ownership of some oilfields. Then, finally, we went into his studio."
According to Armanna, Etete who appeared to be “revved up”, opened two bottles of champagne, spoke in English and, at times, addressed Emeka Obi in a Nigerian language. Etete claimed that OPL 245 was not worth less than 4-5 billion dollars. Armanna claimed he disputed this figure and informed Etete that OPL 245 was not his, as he had not yet paid in full for the license because he was short $200 million. Furthermore, he told Etete that there was no evidence of Etete’s relationship with Malabu. Armanna then claimed that Etete began to scream, "You whites as usual! All the same!” Etete is then alleged to have pointed his finger at Armanna and said, "Take care to hear well, when Descalzi was no-one he used to take orders from me." Etete then pointed at Obi and said, "Why do you at Eni need him?" Armanna then alleged that he left the meeting but not before witnessing Etete loudly berating Emeka Obi that, "I do not give you a mandate! You want my money!" Armanna claimed that at this point, "I called the security men and we left quickly. I phoned Casula. Told him about the unpleasant spectacle and told him the words of Etete on Descalzi. I explained that Obi had no mandate from Etete. I thought that the story had ended there, but I was wrong."
Armanna gave the Italian journalists further details that would appear to incriminate Descalzi and Casula directly. Armanna told the journalists that, in early 2010, he was called to a meeting in Milan by Descalzi. He gave the journalists an account of the meeting that he reportedly gave to the magistrates in Milan. Armanna claimed that in the meeting with Descalzi, "I told him all my perplexity and told him that Etete was not a person with whom it was appropriate to speak. I told him also what Etete said about him being his butler, in reference to their relationship at the end of the '90s, when Descalzi had been at the head of the Nigerian Agip Oil Company. Well, I stared at Descalzi without moving a muscle. So, he dismissed me by warning me that the matter was followed directly from Milan. That, in short, I should not do anything obstructive."
Armanna alleged that Casula and Descalzi, then took control of the negotiations and, in February 2010, signed a "confidentiality agreement" with Obi that gave any Eni, 12 months to conclude efforts to acquire OPL 245. The La Repubblica article reported that Armanna noted that by signing the agreement, Eni had committed itself to a stranger who was a "one man company", given that the companies through which he claimed to operate Eleda Partners and Energy Venture Partners were shell companies."
Armanna also sought to implicate Scaroni and another suspect, Gianluca di Nardo directly. Armanna claimed that he tried to convince Casula once again to get rid of Obi, but to no avail and, Casula told him "Obi was linked to Gianluca Di Nardo and that this Di Nardo was partner of well-known financier Francesco Micheli, who, in turn, was close to Scaroni”. Armanna explained that in order to convince him of how close Scaroni and Di Nardo were, Casula showed him an anonymous letter which accused Di Nardo of oil insider trading together with Marco Alverà, another Eni manager close to Scaroni. Casula asserted that the letter ended up filed away without any internal investigation. This in Armanna’s opinion was Casula’s way of making him realize he should watch his step if he did not want to collide with Descalzi and Scaroni over the OPL 245 deal.
On the matter of the money destined for the Italians, Armanna claimed that it became evident to him that Obi was Descalzi’s man because Descalzi called him "boy," and gave him access to the offices of San Donato, as if he was a manager of the group. Armanna said that he was disturbed by the fact that by 2010, it had become common knowledge in Abuja, that the $200 million commission due to Obi was in effect “bribes for Italians”. Armanna was quoted as saying that, "The first to talk about 'kickbacks' for the Italians, was one of the lawyers of Shell. He said, "You cannot take 200 million like that. If you really want to, find another system. And whatever you do, forget it that we pay too.” This according to Armanna underscored "the certainty that Obi would have shared the fee for his mediation with the Italians." Further evidence of this conspiracy, according to Armanna could be found in the actions of Nigeria’s Attorney General who, became hostile in the autumn of 2010, when the negotiations for the acquisition of OPL 245 were appearing to stall. Armanna said that, Adoke threatened to arrest all of them claiming that, he knew that Obi’s $200 million included kickbacks to Eni executives and Etete was being blackmailed into going along with the plan.
The La Repubblica article noted that Armanna produced no evidence, to support his claim that kickbacks were promised to the "Italians", but claimed that he had confidential information from a source whose identity he was not prepared to reveal as it would place he/she at risk. Armanna claimed that his informant told him that out of the tranche of $400 million transferred from Eni to vendors at the time of the acquisition of OPL245, $50 million ended up with Italians. But whether they were Eni men or people close to Eni, the informant was unable to say.
Armanna further revealed that in November 2010, he met with Luigi Bisignani, because even though he and Bisignani were not exactly friends, he was indebted to Bisignani for helping to resolve a health problem with his second son at the Child Jesus hospital. Armanna had thought that Bisignani just wanted to say hello and then, suddenly, Bisignani asked, "Would you tell me what you are doing?" Armanna said he understood that Bisignani was referring to Nigeria, Obi and OPL245, and he tried to explain that in Nigeria it was said that Obi’s "money" would be shared with Scaroni. Armanna claimed that because he knew that Bisignani was very close to Scaroni, he understood that the questions were being asked on behalf of Scaroni. This was made clear to him when Bisignani dismissed him with a request that, "Paolo should know this stuff. Please write me what you said in a note." Armanna said he did as requested and "handed the note to Bisignani’s secretary".
The La Repubblica article ended by reporting that at the end of 2011, Armanna was sent first to Qatar and then, in 2013, to Abu Dhabi where he participated in a contest for the acquisition of the oil field, Adco, with an estimated one and a half million barrels per day, and 50 percent of local participation. Eni wanted the local "sponsor" to be a Jordan law firm and Armanna got in the way once again. Consequently, Eni had had enough and agreed to terminate their relationship with him.
So to round up, in the first episode, Descalzi (the current Eni CEO) roughed up: Scaroni (the former Eni CEO) and; Bisignani (the shady businessman). Bisignani retaliated with some heavy blows against Descalzi but with Scaroni, Obi and Di Nardo (another shady businessman) suffering collateral damage. In the second episode, Armanna (a former member of the board of directors of several Eni subsidiaries, in Nigeria, Congo, Uganda, Qatar and, Saudi Arabia), entered the fray with some vicious swipes at: Descalzi; Scaroni; Bisignani; Di Nardo; a new entrant, Casula (former Vice-President Eni for Africa and now head of development and operations); Shell (another new entrant that was allegedly privvy to the scheme to pay bribes); Etete (the former oil minister who unlawfully awarded OPL 245 to himself) and; Adoke, (Nigeria’s current Attorney General who failed to act on suspicion that Eni officials were engaged in a conspiracy to defraud and blackmail and chose instead to threaten and blackmail the conspirators to push through a deal in which the FGN acted as “obligor” between the conspirators and the former oil minister that had unlawfully awarded the licence to himself).
It would appear that the mud being flung around in Italy is now landing on Nigerian government officials. Who will tell the President?