Nigeria seizes ship with 2,500 T of stolen fuel

Nigerian authorities have seized a ship carrying 2,500 tonnes of fuel refined from stolen oil in the creeks of the Niger Delta, home to Africa's biggest energy industry, they said on Sunday.

Tapping into pipelines and stealing fuel for sale on to world markets or to feed illegal refineries has become the main scourge of the delta region, as armed militancy subsided following a 2009 amnesty.

Oil companies say 150,000 barrels per day (bpd) is stolen and the finance ministry said last year that Nigeria is losing up to a fifth of the oil revenues from 2 million plus bpd to the practice. The real figure is not known because output is poorly recorded.

"The vessel was on the verge of filling the fourth of its compartments before it was intercepted by a team of operatives," Lieutenant Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu, spokesman for the mixed military and police Joint Task Force (JTF) in the delta, said of Saturday's operation.

"The crew on board the barge fled into the mangrove forest on sighting operatives of the JTF, abandoning their barge."

The government launched a military crackdown on oil thieves last year, but success has been limited, partly because of complicity by some security forces in the lucrative criminal enterprise.

In a separate operation, Nwachukwu's statement said 30 open boats carrying illegally refined fuel were also impounded in the delta, a region of narrow creeks and mangrove swamps.

Twenty one suspects were arrested in the week leading up to April 14, he said.

Shell declared force majeure on Nigeria's benchmark Bonny Light crude exports last week, while it tries to fix dozens of places where the Nembe Creek trunkline has been hacked into by thieves.

A deadly attack on police two weeks ago and emailed threats from a militant group raised fears Niger Delta militants could resurrect a campaign of violence that cut oil output by half at its peak during the last decade, but generous amnesty payments to former commanders make that unlikely. (Reporting by Tife Owolabi; Writing by Tim Cocks; editing by Jason Neely)

 

Source: Reuters