by Theleaders | July 29, 2026 10:18 am
ABUJA, July 29 — Shell executives knew oil thieves were tapping pipelines but declined to shut them down in order to preserve profits, a report from Amnesty International and a coalition of rights groups charged Wednesday.
The report, the latest in decades of allegations of pollution by international petroleum majors in Nigeria, is based on internal audits and emails made public as Shell faces lawsuits from local communities in the oil-rich, cash-poor Niger Delta.
“A significant cause of the pollution lies in Shell’s failure to properly maintain the vast network of wells and pipelines” operated by its Nigerian subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company, the report said.
But executives at both Shell and its subsidiary were also aware of rampant oil theft — allegedly facilitated in part by corrupt SPDC employees — the report said.
The report quoted a 2013 internal presentation on tapped pipelines that asked: “Are we comfortable to continue producing, KNOWING that further environmental damage WILL occur?”
Shell has said in court that it was not responsible for the actions of its subsidiaries, including SPDC in Nigeria, which it claimed operated independently — but the internal presentation warning of the pollution linked to oil theft was prepared as part of the organisation’s so-called Project Madrid, which involved senior parent company officials.
“People are going to say ‘What is Shell doing?… It had an alternate course of action to stop pumping which it did not elect. Now it has created a monster’” one executive wrote.
Oil majors move offshore
Ultimately, the company decided to allow tapped pipelines to operate “on a stop-start basis,” only stopping when pollution above a certain threshold was reached, the report said.
The discovery of oil in southeast Nigeria, in the 1950s, has made Nigeria one of Africa’s largest economies — though much of the wealth remains concentrated at the top of a massively unequal society plagued by decades of government corruption.
Militancy and oil theft linked to the environmental and economic crises caused by onshore operations led to serious violence in the 2000s.
Though diminished, oil theft and illegal refining — known as “bunkering” — continues to this day.
Most oil majors have left Nigeria’s onshore fields to move to more stable off-shore sites. Local firms have mostly taken their place onshore.
Shell and others are accused of offloading the sites to avoid paying for the environmental damage they caused.
In response to the report, Shell said the investigation “selectively referred to and quoted from documents in a way that creates a misleading impression”.
Renaissance, a consortium of mostly Nigerian firms that bought SPDC in 2025, marking Shell’s official exit from onshore operations, did not respond to the report.
Source URL: https://theleaders-online.com/shell-knew-nigerian-thieves-tapped-pipes-but-kept-oil-flowing-amnesty-says/
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