UK LEGAL firm Leigh Day is pushing Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary to expedite clean-up of the polluted Bodo community in Ogoniland, and urgently implement health screening and tests to assess water potability in a fast-degrading environment.

Leigh Day has received no response from Shell, against whom it won a $55 million compensation claim and clean-up assurance on behalf of 35 villages, and it may return to court if efforts fail to persuade the supermajor to start remediation, a senior lawyer at the practice told Upstream. Last weekend, Leigh Day publicised a claim made by Kay Holtzman, a former Shell employee charged with clean-up work, that toxic substances pervaded creek side pathways and “the soil is soaked with hydrocarbons, exposing locals to negative, unpredictable long-term effects on health”.

Medical screening is necessary “following exposure to dangerous hydrocarbons through bathing and drinking water”, said Holtzman in a letter to Shell.

The letter was copied to Iniemo Samiama, chairman of the Bodo Mediation Initiative (BMI), as well as Eric Solheim, the Netherlands' ambassador to Nigeria and executive director of the UN Environment Programme, who this January charged BMI with effecting the clean-up.

Holtzman said an analysis of clean-up requirements conducted back in August 2015 met with “fierce opposition” from Shell in Nigeria.

Leigh Day agreed to take a back seat while the Dutch ambassador tried to cajole the oil giant into implementing the remediation court order.

Compensation has been disbursed to individuals on Leigh Day’s 15,500-strong claimant list but little has been done to remediate an environmental disaster left unattended since two oil spills from the TransNiger Pipeline devastated the community in 2008.

“It’s been 10 years now and if this continues then at some point we will have to go to court to compel Shell’s compliance," said the lawyer.

"The 2011 UN Report of Ogoniland estimated about $1 billion was needed for remediation but that figure would be considerably higher now.”

Shell and BMI informed Holtzman that his six-month contract did not permit publication of findings and both the supermajor and BMI declined to allow him to reveal the results of the Shoreline Clean-up Assessment Technique (SCAT) in scientific journals.

Leigh Day said Shell had been active in the affected areas but this work took the form of corporate social responsibility rather than a concerted remediation campaign. “This letter from Holtzman shows that even those who were employed by Shell are deeply concerned by their behaviour and their lack of transparency," said Leigh Day's senior lawyer. "Shell must act now.”

A spokeswoman for Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) said: “From the outset, SPDC accepted responsibility for the two deeply regrettable operational spills in Bodo and remains fully committed to ensuring clean-up takes place... and will continue to work with the BMI to implement a remediation plan."

She said clean-up work has been hit by numerous delays, claiming that, since 2015, the Bodo community has not allowed clean-up contractors to access the affected area and that community members are seeking injunctions restraining SPDC from undertaking clean-up and remediation work.

All questions about environmental assessment work, she said, "are best directed to the BMI".

BMI’s Semiama told Upstream that Holtzman breached non-disclosure undertakings by publishing the SCAT results, claiming he had left Nigeria following a poor performance assessment amid growing discord among stakeholders.

“It’s now time to put behind us all the intrigues, obstacles, demands for money and just get on with it — we’ve had some breakthroughs of late including the removal of injunctions, allowing us access to mobilise our teams, hopefully before May,” said Semiama.

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Shell put under pressure over pollution clean-up