Presidency Denies Taking Modu Sheriff to Chad

The presidency yesterday denied the allegation that President Goodluck Jonathan took the former Governor of Borno State, Ali Modu Sheriff, to Chad, inspite of the recent allegation naming him as one of the sponsors of Boko Haram.

Also, the presidency assured Nigerians that Jonathan will not interfere in the ongoing investigation of Sheriff.

The denial was contained in a statement issued by the president’s spokesman, Dr. Reuben Abati.

“We have noted with surprise, the unnecessary hue and cry raised by the All Progressives Congress (APC) and other bigoted critics of the Jonathan administration over the claim that the president is ‘hobnobbing’ with the former governor of Borno State.

“Senator Ali Modu Sheriff was recently accused by the Australian, Stephen Davis, of being one of the chief sponsors of the terrorist group, Boko Haram.

“The totally erroneous basis for that charge was the spurious claim that Senator Sheriff accompanied President Jonathan on his recent trip to Ndjamena as a member of his entourage.

“Although Senator Sheriff himself has already given the lie to that claim through his media adviser, the presidency wishes to affirm, for the purpose of emphasis, that the former Borno State governor was not on President Jonathan’s delegation to Chad.

“In keeping with President Jonathan’s commitment to transparency and openness in the conduct of government business, names of the key members of his delegation were announced a day before his trip to Ndjamena.

“They included the National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd.); the Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson; the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Nurudeen Mohammed; and the Director-General of National Space Research and Development Agency, Prof. Seidu Mohammed.

“As can be easily verified from the complete list of members of the presidential entourage to Chad which was also circulated on Sunday and never changed, Senator Sheriff’s name was not on it. The only other persons on the list were the president’s aides, security personnel and journalists,” the statement said.

It added that “the APC and others who rushed to condemn President Jonathan for a non-existent indiscretion would have found, if they took the least trouble to double-check, that there was absolutely no factual basis for their accusation.

“Those who associate with Senator Sheriff know that he has longstanding interests in Chad and often spends a lot of his time there. He happened to be in Ndjamena at the time of President Jonathan’s visit and joined other Nigerian residents of the Chadian capital in coming to the airport to welcome their president.

“That was the full extent of his participation in the visit and it was also at Ndjamena Airport that the pictures which formed the basis of the bogus allegation of President Jonathan hobnobbing with an ‘accused sponsor of terrorism’ were taken.

“The former governor’s presence in Chad was certainly not at President Jonathan’s instance and he did not participate in any of the president’s discussions with President Idriss Deby or his other engagements in Ndjamena.
“President Jonathan is fully aware of the allegation made against Senator Sheriff by Stephen Davis. That allegation is already being investigated by the security agencies who will make their findings known to the public in due course.”

Jonathan assured all Nigerians that he had not willfully taken any action that could prejudice the outcome of that ongoing inquiry.

He reassured the nation of his total commitment to doing all within his powers to bring all identified and verified sponsors of terrorism to justice, and ending the menace of violent extremism in the country.

Also, a statement by a former Commissioner for Information in Borno State, Inuwa Bwala, yesterday debunked the perception that the embattled ex-governor was on the president’s entourage in Chad.

Bwala, who was a commissioner under Sheriff, told some select journalists yesterday in Maiduguri that Sheriff is a resident of Njadmena, the capital of Chad.
He said: “We wish to state that contrary to reports in some sections of the media that the former Borno State Governor, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, was on the entourage of President Goodluck Jonathan during his recent visit to the Republic of Chad, the former governor was in Chad before the visit and was amongst many other Nigerians who received Mr. President at the airport in Ndjamena.”

Bwala said it was necessary to clarify that Sheriff is more or less a resident of Ndjamena and has pursued his legitimate business in Chad since leaving office in 2011, adding, “It was not out of place for him to receive his own president in Chad.”

He argued that even if the president had travelled with Sheriff, he was doing nothing untowards, “since Sheriff has neither been indicted by a panel of inquiry or found guilty of any offence by any court of law in Nigeria or anywhere”.
He called APC’s spokesman, Lai Muhammed, mischievous and called on Nigerians to disregard his serial lies and that of his party.

Oscar Pistorius: Judge rules athlete guilty of culpable homicide: Faces up to 15years in prison

Oscar Pistorius has been found guilty of culpable homicide for shooting his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp dead on Valentine’s Day 2013. The Olympic star faces up to 15 years in prison for the offence and five more for shooting a gun in a restaurant. Here is a summary of events:
Judge Thokozile Masipa has said he cannot be found guilty of murdering Reeva Steenkamp.

After saying Pistorius had been “negligent” over the killing, she found him guilty of the lesser charge of culpable homicide, which is the South African equivalent of manslaughter.
It carries a maximum sentence of 15 years imprisonment.

The judge said Pistorius made a “conscious decision” to pick up a gun and knew the difference between right and wrong.
She also questioned the reliability of witnesses who say they heard screams and gunshots the night Ms Steenkamp was killed.

He was found guilty of one count of firing a firearm in a public place but cleared of another count of discharging a weapon in a public place.

He was also acquitted of possessing ammunition for an unlicensed firearm.

If there is a conviction, a second trial will begin in which the prosecutors and defence will have the chance to present further witnesses – from family members to psychiatrists – before Judge Masipa decides if and how long Pistorius goes to prison.

Credit: independent

ITALY’S ENI CEO FACES CORRUPTION PROBE OVER MALABU DEAL

The Chief Executive of Italian oil major Eni Claudio Descalzi is under investigation by Milan prosecutors in a case relating to a $1.09 billion acquisition of Nigeria’s OPL-245 offshore oil block in 2011.
Descalzi’s predecessor and another executive of the Italian oil company are also being probed over their role in the acquisition.

Milan prosecutors opened a probe earlier this year and have now widened the net to include Descalzi.
Eni confirmed Descalzi was being investigated after a report in Italian daily Corriere della Sera said he was being probed over the Nigeria deal.

“Eni is cooperating with the Milan prosecutor’s office and is confident that the correctness of its actions will emerge during the course of the investigation,” it said in a statement.
Descalzi, who took the helm at the oil major four months ago, could not immediately be reached for comment.

A long-standing executive at Eni and former head of its core exploration and production division, Descalzi took over in May from Paolo Scaroni, himself under investigation for alleged corruption in Algeria, although the company said in January it had found no evidence of illegal conduct by the group in relation to the north African country.

Eni said its Operations and Technology Officer Roberto Casula was also being probed. Court sources told Reuters on Thursday Scaroni was also under investigation in the Nigerian case. Scaroni and Casula could not immediately be reached for comment.
Milan brokerage Akros noted Eni had been involved in a similar case in Nigeria in 2009, when it paid around $400 million to settle the dispute.

“We believe that the potential negative impact on Eni may be worth 500 million euros or around 1 percent of the current market capitalisation,” it said in a note.

At 1436 GMT shares in Eni, Italy’s biggest company by stock market value, were down about 2 percent, underperforming the European oil and gas sector stocks index, with traders citing concerns about the investigation.
Ownership of the OPL 245 field has been in dispute for more than a decade.
Former Nigerian oil minister Dan Etete awarded the block in 1998 for $20 million to Malabu Oil and Gas, a company in which he was a leading shareholder. Malabu however only ever paid $2 million for the stake, in 1999.
The field was eventually sold on to Eni and Shell in 2011 for a total of $1.3 billion, including a signature bonus of around $207 million.

Malabu received around $1.09 billion from the sale, while the Nigerian government kept the rest, a British court document has shown.

Campaigners for greater transparency in political and business dealings, who asked Britain to look into the matter, allege Shell and Eni used the Nigerian government as a go-between to obscure the fact they were dealing with Etete.

Eni, the biggest foreign oil and gas producer in Africa, has always said it dealt exclusively with the government of Nigeria and Shell over the acquisition.
Elsewhere Ebeka Obi, a Nigerian intermediary for Etete, has brought a court case in Britain against Malabu for unpaid fees relating to what he says was his help in brokering the Shell-Eni deal.

A judicial source on Thursday said the London court had seized Malabu funds worth $83 million. This follows the seizure of $110 million from a Malabu account in Switzerland a few months ago, the source said.
Descalzi, who was head of the group’s exploration and production (E&P) unit at the time of the Nigerian deal, was appointed chief executive of Eni in May.
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi came to office in February pledging to clean up Italian business and introduce ethics rules at publicly-controlled companies, aiming to eject directors found guilty of financial crimes.

But shareholders at many of Italy’s big state-controlled companies, including Eni, threw out the proposals by voting against their inclusion in company bylaws.
OPL 245 could contain up to 9.23 billion barrels of crude oil, more than enough to keep China running for two and a half years.
Eni has operated in Nigeria since the early 1960s and the country accounted for around 8 percent of its total output last year. Chronic oil pipe sabotage in the country has recently affected the group’s hydrocarbon production in the country.

95% of Nasarawa will vote Jonathan- Maku

Information Minister, Labaran Maku said on Thursday that President Goodluck Jonathan would get up to 95 per cent of votes from the state in the 2015 presidential election.

Maku made this known to newsmen after PDP stakeholders’ consultative forum in Akwanga, Nassarawa state.

He said that Jonathan had immensely improved the lot of the state by establishing a university in the state, a Central Bank building, Court of Appeal, Federal Secretariat, roads and bridges.

“If you look at what is happening in Nigeria today, there is no reason for the people of Nigeria not to rise in support of Mr President.

“If you look at what this president has done in Nassarawa state, in 2015 the president should expect 95 per cent of the votes in the presidential election in Nassarawa state.

“As you have seen here, the youth are saying it must be Goodluck, the women are saying it must be Goodluck, the elders are saying it must be Goodluck.

“It is clear to every Nigerian that if election is conducted today, the president will take 70 per cent of the votes in the south, what we saw in Ibadan was very clear,” he said.

He said that the people of the state had insisted that rotation of the presidency was usually after eight years and as such, Mr President must be supported to complete the remaining four-year term of the South-South.

Maku stressed that the South-South had never ruled the nation before even though they were the main source of the nation’s wealth, adding that power would return to the north by 2019.

He said that sitting president or governors should not be compelled to go for party primaries, but should emerge automatically as consensus candidates.

The minister said that unless where a party accepted that it had failed the people, primary elections would be a waste of resources.

The minister urged party members to unite and support Jonathan against the opposition parties.

Nigeria’s growing number of female oil bosses

The oil and gas industry is still overwhelmingly male, with surveys showing that the executive boardrooms of petroleum companies are mostly a boys’ club.

In Nigeria, a number of well-financed businesswomen are aiming to change the picture there. The Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke is a powerful figurehead for them.

“The fact that two of the biggest cabinet positions in Nigeria, petroleum and finance, are held by women, show how far we have come,” she told a recent meeting in Vienna, referring to the other prominent female member of the cabinet – Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

“We are there not because we are women. We are there because of our competence as managers.”

Yet as surveys make clear, women managers are still in the minority in the world’s oil and gas companies. Laura Manson-Smith, a consulting partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, says the representation picture is dismal.

“I was surprised at how low the percentage of female directors was [in oil and gas firms around the globe] – 11%, most of them are in non-executive positions, 1% of executive board seats are held by women.” “‘People trust women more,” says Ladol’s

Nigeria, the world’s 14th-largest oil producing country with 2.4 million barrels a day, has taken steps to open up its oil industry to locals, a policy known as “indigenisation.” Now a handful of female entrepreneurs are hoping to build on that, by increasing women’s stake in the industry.
“When we were growing up we only had Margaret Thatcher,” says Amy Jadesimi, the managing director of Ladol, a petroleum services company based in Lagos.

Dr Jadesimi, a thirty-something former Goldman Sachs analyst, medical doctor and MBA says that today, “woman are taking for granted, that of course a woman can reach the highest levels of society”.

Ladol has turned a site reclaimed from a swamp and an industrial wasteland into a $500m (£300m) port facility to support offshore drilling operations, including ship repair, maintenance, engineering and construction. It is planning a second phase of expansion that will take the investment to $1bn. “Nobody had done what we’d done before across the whole of West Africa,” says

Dr Jadesimi. Catherine Uju Ifejika is chairman and chief executive of the Britannia U Group, a group of oil and gas companies. Her business bought a stake in a major oil and gas field, Ajapa. The reserves, according to Britannia, are worth $4.3bn.

“You men, you don’t even know how to boil water or where the children’s school uniforms are,” she jokes.
“We are able to hold your homes together, and we are beginning to translate that into boardroom jobs, and then owning companies. In six years I have formed seven companies.”

She says 70% of her staff are men, “and they’re not used to having a woman as a chairman or chief executive – a woman, a black woman, a black African woman.”

Thinking big:

And though it supplies only 15% of the country’s GDP ($522bn) it is the most symbolic industry. Winihin Ayuli-Jemide, a Lagos- based entrepreneur and former lawyer, is a leading advocate of research on women in business and government.

She argues that one of the reasons South Africa was the dominant economy in Africa for so long is that South African women have been deeply involved in businesses of all sizes.

“They dominate the low capital businesses, the ‘informal sector’ such as manufacturing knitwear, tie and dye and homemade food for sale in municipal markets.”

“At the level of small to medium enterprises, they’re well ingrained and established.”

She wants Nigerian women to think bigger – and to investment in areas such as oil and gas.

“When I was working for a large investment company in the City of London, the other woman on the board was the human resources director,” said Jennie Paterson, founder of the financial consulting firm Fraser Whitley.

“I think we need to encourage women to have a broader executive skillset.”
Oil accounts for 95% of Nigeria’s foreign exchange revenues

Women ‘are trusted more:

Yewande Sadiku is chief executive of the Lagos-based financing firm Stanbic IBTC Capital. She says that the lenders providing loans to Nigerian and other African women too often had a limited outlook.
They only think women are good customers for micro-finance loans, she argues.

“[This mentality] says, let’s give them lots of small loans, 50,000 to 100,000 naira, ($300 to $700), so they can run small businesses and feed their families,” she says.

“Raising funds is difficult, but to be honest, people trust women more,” Amy Jadesimi laughs.

“You have to have a watertight proposal, make a good financing case and be confident in your pitch.” A series of studies by McKinsey titled Women Matter, found that companies with a higher proportion of female executives showed stronger financial performance than those with no women in top positions.

The study showed that women tended to apply certain “leadership behaviours” more than men. They included people development, setting expectations and rewards and acting as role models. Winihin Ayuli-Jemide welcomes these studies. “In Africa we really don’t have information about gender issues”, she said.

“Nothing on how we are doing in the economy.”

“In oil and gas, women are emerging. There is a businesscase for it.”

Credit: BBC