Fejiro Oliver
Deep in the creeks of Agge, Bayelsa State, sits a vessel Nigerian law says should not exist in private hands: an oil terminal SEEPCO built and operates without federal authorisation, receiving hundreds of thousands of barrels of Okwuibome crude a day while the company chaired by Anthony Chukwueke has not paid a single naira in Petroleum Profit Tax in over thirteen years of production at the time this medium was carrying out this investigation.
The vessel is MT Vishvamata, an FPSO which is a floating production, storage and offloading facility built in 2002, carrying the IMO number 9175224 and MMSI 657181500.
Unlike Tulja Bhavani, the Gazetted terminal our investigation detailed in Part 1, Vishvamata has the capacity to refine crude and perform full oil terminal functions: receiving crude fed directly from SEEPCO’s overnight barge convoys and, in turn, feeding a network of satellite vessels our investigation identified as MT Ananta, MT Vrinda, MT Ambe and MV Ambika. An oil terminal, under Nigerian law, is an industrial facility for storing and exporting petroleum products and the Oil Terminal Dues Act of 1965 does not permit a private company to own one outright. Vishvamata has operated exactly that way for over a decade, and our findings show it should be treated as an illegal terminal warranting immediate federal investigation.
A tax bill of zero, and an excuse the courts have already rejected
Nigerian law is unambiguous: any oil company that makes its first sale of chargeable crude is required to begin paying Petroleum Profit Tax (PPT) from that point forward, collected by the Federal Inland Revenue Service. According to NEITI’s own disclosures, SEEPCO has not paid PPT since it began production in 2011. The company’s stated reason is that its cost of production is so high it exceeds any taxable profit. In effect, its telling Nigeria it loses money producing one of the most sought-after crude grades in the world.
That defence does not survive contact with Nigerian case law. In SNEPCO & 3 Ors v. FIRS & Anor, the courts held plainly that the obligation to pay Petroleum Profit Tax is a statutory duty, not a contractual one that a company can simply price its way out of. SEEPCO has generated well over $10 billion from the more than 1.1 billion barrels our investigation estimates it has lifted since 2011 and has paid Petroleum Profit Tax on none of it.
The reason nobody outside SEEPCO can independently confirm any of the company’s production, royalty or tax figures is structural: our investigation could not identify a single certified, independently monitored oil meter anywhere along the route crude takes from the Beneku wellheads, through the overnight barge loadings, to either the Tulja Bhavani or Vishvamata terminals.
Without a working meter, every number the company reports to NEITI, to NMDPRA, to the Federal Inland Revenue Service now NRS is a number Nigeria has to take entirely on SEEPCO’s word. That is not an oversight that has persisted by accident for thirteen years; it is the single gap that makes every other figure in this investigation impossible to police, and one Chairman Anthony Chukwueke has done nothing to close.
Sacked for asking questions
On local content, our findings show a workforce dominated by expatriate Indian staff, with Nigerians largely confined to junior roles and shut out of the company’s management tier. Former Nigerian staff who pushed back on this pattern told SecretsReporters they were dismissed and, in several cases, sued the company; disputes that were quietly settled out of court, with confidentiality terms that our reporters found have kept the details of those settlements from ever becoming public. Our requests to the Nigeria Immigration Service for the true number of expatriate workers SEEPCO employs, filed under the Freedom of Information Act, remain unanswered.
Our investigation also found that the environmental damage tied to SEEPCO’s barge-based crude evacuation, the method the company markets internally as “innovative” has repeatedly drawn community protests over pollution in the riverine areas the barges pass through, complaints that our findings show were met with National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) assessments favourable to the company rather than to the communities filing them.
This report is Part 3 of a SecretsReporters investigation into Sterling Oil Exploration & Energy Production Company Ltd (SEEPCO) and its Nigerian oil operations
