(Adds lawyer requests, company comment)
By Emilio Parodi
MILAN, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Nigeria asked a Milan court on
Wednesday to order Eni and Royal Dutch Shell
to pay $1.092 billion as an immediate advance payment for
damages it is claiming in one of the oil industry's biggest-ever
corruption trials.
At a hearing into alleged corruption linked to Eni and
Shell's 2011 acquisition of the OPL 245 field, Lucio Lucia,
lawyer for the Nigerian government, called for a guilty verdict
and an advance payment, ahead of any broader damages package set
by a court at a later date.
Lucia did not specify how much Nigeria was seeking in
damages overall but said the disputed deal had deprived Abuja of
"profit oil", adding "these are massive amounts".
The lawyer said that calculated under two different
scenarios, the profits that had been lost amounted to $4.5
billion and $5.9 billion respectively.
The long-running bribery case revolves around the purchase
of the OPL 245 offshore field, some 150 km off the Niger Delta,
for about $1.3 billion from Malabu, a company owned by former
Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete.
Prosecutors allege that about $1.1 billion of that was
siphoned off to politicians and middlemen, half of it to Etete
himself.
Shell says the 2011 agreement was a settlement of
long-standing litigation, following the previous allocation of
the block by the Nigerian government to Shell and Malabu.
Etete, Eni, Shell and the managers accused in the Milan
court case, including Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi, have all denied
any wrongdoing.
Eni said in a statement on Wednesday that the purchase price
for OPL 245 was "congruous and reasonable" considering the value
of the field and investment needed to bring it into production.
In July, prosecutors in the case asked for Eni and Shell to
be fined and some of their present and former executives,
including Eni's Descalzi, to be jailed.
They also requested the confiscation of a total of $1.092
billion from all the defendants in the case, the equivalent of
the bribes alleged to have been paid.
The next hearing in the trial is scheduled for Sept. 21,
when the defence is due to present its case.
(Reporting by Emilio Parodi; Writing by Stephen Jewkes; Editing
by Jason Neely and Alexander Smith)
