Royal Dutch Shell has filed a criminal complaint against a former senior employee, Peter Robinson, over suspected bribes in the $390m sale of an oilfield in Nigeria, where the company is already under investigation over a separate deal.
Dutch prosecutors confirmed they had received the complaint against Robinson, a former vice president for sub-Saharan Africa at Shell. They said it would be included in an ongoing investigation into Shell and Italy’s Eni over the acquisition of a different Nigerian oilfield, known as Oil Prospecting Licence 245.
Shell and Eni deny any wrongdoing related to OPL 245, in which Robinson is being prosecuted. A spokesman for Anglo-Dutch Shell said the two cases were unrelated, according to Reuters.
Chiara Padovani, a lawyer representing Robinson, said in a statement that he denied any allegation of misconduct. Robinson has not been contacted by Dutch authorities about any such complaint, she added.
“Our client regrets that an issue between him and his former employer has been drawn into the public domain. He has not been informed of the details of Shell’s complaint against him,” Padovani stated.
Shell said an internal investigation had found that Robinson might have committed a crime during the sale of an onshore oilfield, Oil Mining Lease 42, to Neconde Energy Limited, a Nigerian E&P company, by the oil major in February 2011.
A Shell spokesman said in a statement, “We suspect a crime may have been committed by our former employee, Peter Robinson, against Shell in relation to the sale process for Oil Mining Lease 42 in Nigeria in 2011.
“We have filed a criminal complaint with the Dutch authorities and are considering other steps we could take.”
Robinson is one of a number of Shell employees being prosecuted in Milan over OPL 245, a case spanning several countries that involves Nigerian government officials and oil executives in a $1.3bn sale of the offshore field.
He worked in Nigeria for Shell from 2008 to 2011 as vice president for commercial in the sub-Saharan Africa region, part of a tenure at the company lasting more than 30 years.
The new evidence was uncovered after investigators looking into OPL 245 raided a house in Perth, Australia owned by Robinson, according to a source close to the process.
The evidence included documents showing Robinson had set up a Seychelles-based company, which was later linked to two Swiss bank accounts set up in 2011 also under his name, the source said.
Shell suspected that the company and the accounts might have been used to process kickbacks, the source added.
In court filings, the Milan prosecutor requested that Swiss authorities investigate and freeze two accounts opened at a Geneva bank in the name of Seychelles-based Energy Venture Partners Limited to check their connection to Robinson.
Shell, the largest international oil producer in Nigeria, is looking methodically at other transactions in which Robinson was involved, the source said.
The spokesman said Shell had informed the United States Department of Justice and the US Securities and Exchange Commission about the offshore company and the accounts.
Swiss federal prosecutors have supplied information to authorities in Italy and the Netherlands probing alleged corruption related to oil contracts in Nigeria, the Office of the Attorney General said on Wednesday.