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August 23, 2010

UN Report Exonerates Shell for Oil Pollution in Niger Delta
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The Guardian newspaper reports a three-year investigation by the United
Nations is expected to exonerate almost entirely the oil company Shell
for forty years of oil pollution in the Niger Delta. According to the
newspaper, the report claims that only ten percent of oil pollution in
Ogoniland has been caused by equipment failures and company negligence
and that the rest has come from local people illegally stealing oil and
sabotaging company pipelines. Last year, Amnesty calculated that the
equivalent of at least nine million barrels of oil has been spilled in
the Delta over the past half-century, nearly twice as much as the five
million barrels unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico by the BP Deepwater
Horizon disaster.



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