Shell: security spending or dirty work?
Published on : 23 August 2012 – 11:49am | By Saskia Houttuin (Photos: AFP/ANP)
Leaked documents show that Dutch-British oil and gas company Shell financed Nigeria’s security forces, which are often seen as corrupt and involved in human rights violations. A Dutch political party raised questions, calling Shell’s financing ‘irresponsible and unacceptable’.
The data, which was leaked by a former Shell employee, has been analysed by the British organisation Platform, in a document entitled “Dirty Work: Shell’s security spending in Nigeria and beyond”. The report writes that Shell spent over a billion U.S. dollars on global security between 2007 and 2009. It says that, out of that amount, 383 million went to Nigeria, including the notorious ‘kill and go’ police, a nickname for the Nigerian Mobile police, says the report.