respectively sentenced to eight years and seven years plus four months in prison by the Milan public prosecutor, the CEO of the Italian group Eni, and the former CEO of Shell's Exploration and Production division, Malcolm Brinded, have just been definitively acquitted.

The Italian court, which accused European oil companies of paying bribes of $1 billion for the acquisition of the offshore block OPL 245, has just cleared their honor for de good. “After more than eight years of expensive investigations and legal proceedings that damaged the company's image and reputation [...], Eni and its managers are definitively acquitted,” the Italian oil tanker, who, like Shell, pleaded no guilty. Dan Etete, former Nigerian oil minister from 1995 to 2007 and the first beneficiary of the illegal agreement, was also acquitted of corruption charges by the Italian judiciary. Recall that the latter was accused in 1998, while still managing Malabu Oil & Gas, of secretly self-allocating the OPL 245 offshore block, one of the richest oilfields on the continent, with a capacity estimated at nearly 9 billion barrels of crude oil.