Once again re-adjourned, the mega-corruption trial of energy majors Shell and ENI will finally take place in Milan, Italy on 20 June. The hearing will focus on the 2011 purchase by Shell and ENI of the OPL 245 Nigerian super-oil field for $ 1.3 billion, which is believed to be holding 9 billion barrels of oil.
Amongst the accused, we find big industry names such as ENI executive Claudio Descalzi and former Shell Chairman Malcolm Brinded. Anticorruption group Global Witness said the bribery scheme "robbed the Nigerian people of over a billion dollars… (it) equates to one and a half times what the UN says is needed to respond to the current famine crisis ".
The trial is the result of a strange litigation between two Nigerian: former oil minister Dan Etete, who was already found guilty of corruption in France, and middleman Emeka Obi. In short, Dan Etete controlled OPL 245 through his company Malabu Oil and Gas, which sold the oil field to Shell and ENI.
In the process, Obi had arranged the deal, and vocally complained when Malabu refused to pay him his share of the deal: "at least $ 100 million", he said. Etete is also suspected of having channeled money from the deal to Nigerian politicians.
Over the years, OPL 245 became a symbol of corruption; while The Economist said this "corruption probe raises uncertainty over the future of Eni's boss", the Financial Times wrote "the trial, expected to last until at least 2019, threatens to cast a cloud over an otherwise positive outlook for Eni, which has emerged as one of the industry’s most prolific oil and gas explorers under Mr Descalzi’s leadership".
But the scandal got a new twist when Bloomberg published on 24 May "the Mystery of a Geneva Briefcase, Nigeria Middleman and Big Oil", explaining how the entire trial could depend on a single mysterious briefcase.
In 2016, a Swiss prosecutor raided the flat of a controversial financier and former Credit Suisse banker on another fraud investigation. Incredibly, they discovered Emeka Obi's briefcase containing "SIM cards, Nigerian passports, a laptop and a hard drive containing more than 40,000 documents".
As a Swiss media revealed, the financier whose flat was raided is no less than Olivier Couriol, manager of Noor Capital in Abu Dhabi, who is named in a corruption case in Mali which involves Airbus, the European multinational corporation. The key question on everyone's mind is what precisely appears in the documents? How damaging could it be for ENI, Shell, Obi and Couriol?
Perhaps revealingly, when he discovered the documents, the Swiss prosecutor got in touch with his Italian counterparts, as the trial could depend on them. He also opened a new investigation against Obi and interrogated Couriol, who claimed to know Obi since 2014 when he had asked him to invest in his Malian projects.
Unconvincingly, Couriol stated Obi forgot the briefcase while on holidays at his flat, and denied knowing anything about its content.
Obi's lawyers have desperately tried to forbid, or at the very least delay, the sharing of information from Geneva to Milan. Italian prosecutors are now anxious to obtain the documents before the trial on 20 June.
As the clock is ticking, one briefcase hidden at Couriol's flat could define the outcome of the greatest oil corruption case in living memories. 20 June is the date to watch.