LONDON (ShareCast) – (ShareCast News) – UK oil company Soma Oil and Gas, focussed on exploration and production in Somalia, allegedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Somali civil servants, according to a United Nations (UN) report and is now the subject of a Serious Fraud Office investigation. The experts pointed out the firm paid around $ 600,000 to protect and expand an energy exploration contract it signed with Somalia’s oil ministry in 2013, creating a “serious conflict of interest, in a number of cases appearing to fund systematic payoffs to senior ministerial officials”.
UN’s Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group established that Soma & Oil Gas also paid $ 495,000 to Canadian lawayer J.Jay Park’s, Petroleum Regimes Advisory (PRA), which was in charge of giving advise to the African nation’s government when it was negotiating a contract with the company.
The oil exploration contract was the first, and so far the only one, in the country since it descended into civil war in the early 1990s.
According to the report, at least six officials who drew Somali government salaries were involved in the case, including director general of the oil ministry, Farah Abdi Hassan, and his deputy, Jabril Mohamoud Geeddi.
Although the company’s chief executive Robert Sheppard told the Monitoring Group that the payments were part of a “Capacity Building Agreement” requested by the Somali government, the group said these “quid pro quo” arrangements were “instrumental in both securing the company’s initial contract, and negotiating subsequent agreements”.
The report has triggered an investigation into the company by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO). As a consequence, its London headquarters were searched last week.
