Agreement to block supply of stolen crude oil

Nigeria has signed a deal to supply Cote d’Ivoire 30,000 barrels of crude oil daily to block illegal supplies after it traced stolen crude oil from its Niger Delta oilfields to an Ivorian refinery, state television reported on Wednesday. Nigerian Television Authority said the agreement signed in the capital, Abuja, on Tuesday followed a protest by President Olusegun Obasanjo to his Ivorian counterpart President Laurent Gbagbo in early August. The Ivorian authorities subsequently asked for direct crude oil supplies from Nigeria. The Ivory Coast Minister for Mines and Energy, Emmanuel Leon Monnet Leon, who signed for his government, acknowledged that the state-owned Societe Ivorien Refinery had bought crude from Nigerian suppliers in the past without knowing it was stolen, the television said. "As soon as Societe Ivorien Refinery was made aware of this illicit practice on 6 August 2003, it refused access to its receiving installations to three of such tankers arriving from Nigeria," he said. Jackson Gaius-Obaseki, head of the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, who signed on behalf of the government, said the agreement was evidence that cooperation between African countries had become a reality and was "no longer lip-service". The agreement between the two countries, he added, would be executed transparently. Nigerian authorities and oil transnationals pumping crude in Africa's leading producer country estimate 300,000 barrels of crude oil worth $2.7 billion yearly, are lost to sophisticated criminal rings that use barges and smaller vessels to tap the product from the network of pipelines in the oil-rich but volatile Niger Delta. The crude oil is then transferred to bigger vessels waiting offshore for sale in neighbouring countries or in the international market.