A five-man panel of the Supreme Court led by Justice Olabode Rhodes-Vivour on Friday rejected an application by Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) seeking a review of the January 11, 2019 judgment ordering it to pay N17bn to some Ogoni communities in Rivers State affected by an oil spill.
The Supreme Court had on January 11, 2019 upheld the judgment of the Court of Appeal, which had slapped N17 billion damages against Shell for oil spill in Ejama-Ebubu in Tai Eleme local government area of Rivers State.
But the appellants, which include SPDC Nigeria, Shell International Petroleum Company Limited and Shell International Exploration and Production BV, in an application dated July 24, 2019, prayed the Supreme Court to revisit the case with a view of setting aside the Appeal Court’s judgement on the grounds that the apex court did not go into the merit of their appeal before upholding the decision of the lower court.
But in a unanimous judgement prepared by Justice Centus Nweze but delivered by Justice Samuel Osuji who is not a member of the panel, the judges held that the appeal filed by Shell is unmeritorious.
The court in addition held that it could not revisit its earlier decision on the matter and accordingly dismissed the appeal for being incompetent and lacking in merit.
Justice Osuji however held that parties are to bear the cost of their litigation.
At the proceedings of September 22, Chief Isaac Agbara and nine other respondents had urged the court to reject the request for being frivolous.
The respondents had, in their preliminary objection through their lead counsel, Mr. Lucius Nwosu, described Shell’s request as scandalous and an affront to the finality of the Supreme Court of Nigeria.
Nwosu, while urging the court to dismiss Shell’s application for being incompetent, submitted that the Supreme Court could not sit on appeal in its own judgment.
The lawyer further argued that the action of the oil giant was a deliberate abuse of court process with a weighty request based on 23 grounds.
He further contended that the Supreme Court by its unanimous judgment of January 11, 2019, put an end to the over 30-year-old legal tussle on the oil spill suffered by the respondents and their people in the oil producing region.
Nwosu drew the attention of the panel to a letter of the Supreme Court in which the current Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Ibrahim Muhammad, while reacting to a clarification to the January 11, 2019 judgment, made it clear that the appeal by Shell Petroleum had become spent.
He further informed the court that the judgment being sought to be set aside by the oil company had already been partly executed with over N1 billion recovered by the respondents, adding that section 235 of the 1999 Constitution makes the Supreme Court a final court in the land and that no appeal can be entertained from the Supreme Court decision.
He therefore pleaded with the court to reject the invitation by Shell to make the court sit as an appellate court in its own judgment so as not to make the court eat its words.
The lawyer noted that the same Shell which is reluctant to pay damages to Nigerian victims of its oil spill had in similar situations pay over $206 million to victims in Mexico.
But the company, through its team of lawyers led by Mr. Wole Olanipekun, described the opposition of the respondents as frivolous because it has no bearing with jurisdictional issue.
Olanipekun contended that what the respondents tagged a judgment was a ruling and not a final judgment.
The other senior lawyers were Mr. Lateef Fagbemi; a former attorney general of the federation and minister of justice, Chief Mr. Kanu Agabi, Dr Wale Babalakin, and Wale Akoni.
Olanipekun submitted that Shell’s request has a judicial precedence, adding that the oil company would not have come back to the Supreme Court to seek for review of its judgment if there was no precedent.
He faulted the claim that the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal in its January 11, 2019 decision, arguing that there cannot be a dismissal when a matter had not been heard on merit.
He therefore pleaded with the apex court to dismiss the preliminary objection to its client’s application for judgment review.
