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Justice Taiwo Taiwo of the Federal High Court, Abuja Monday ordered the Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited and the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to pay the oil communities N81.9 billion over oil spillage.
While he awarded the sum of N42.8 billion as damages for intangible losses, N21.9 billion was equally awarded for special damages as annotated and N10 billion as general damages.
In his judgment, Justice Taiwo Taiwo, ordered that the payment must be paid within 14 days, saying failure of which 8 per cent interest would be accruable on the principal sum annually.
The affected communities that will benefit what the court described as cumulative damages domiciled in Ibeno LGA of Akwa Ibom.
The suit this medium reports was instituted against the two defendants by the aggrieved oil producing communities.
Justice Taiwo held further that the American oil company and NNPC were negligent in the way and manner they handled oil spills that caused environmental degradation in the communities.
Taiwo particularly took swipe at the NNPC for being interested in the revenue generations from the oil exploration at the expense of the lives of the people in the communities.
He said that he believed the oral and documentary evidence adduced by the plaintiffs to support their claims that lives were made miserable for them when their water and land were polluted through crude oil leakages from old oil pipelines.
He noted the claims of Mobil that it did clean up exercise but held that the oil giant failed to address the compensation that would have mitigated the economic losses of the people said to be mainly fishermen and farmers.
The Judge, who described as unreliable witnesses called by Mobil, noted that for no reason they became evasive during cross examination by counsel to the plaintiffs.
He held, “The oral and documentary evidence produced by Mobil Company were not in any way helpful to the court, they were targeted at serving predetermined interest.
“Some of the witnesses ought not to have come to the court at all going by the discrepancies in the documents brought to the court, as they only embarked on guess research that was not reliable.
“Both Mobil and NNPC were negligent by their failure to visit places of the leakages of the crude oil that led to the contamination of Rivers and creeks,”
Meanwhile, Justice Taiwo rejected the claims of the Mobile joint venture partner, NNPC, that the suit was statute barred in 2012 when it was filed by the aggrieved plaintiffs.
The NNPC had claimed that the suit was not filed within 12 months by the plaintiffs as required by the provision of Section 12, Sub Section 1 of the NNPC Act, 2004.
However, the judge held that the instant suit had to do with fundamental rights that cannot be rendered impotent by the statute of limitations.
He stated further that Section 11, Subsection 5 of the Oil Pipeline Act made it mandatory for oil companies to monitor and repair their pipelines to avoid spillages and environmental degradation.