# Nigerian king faces Shell in London high court over decades of oil spills

King Okpabi, ruler of Ogale, says Shell has caused chronic pollution, while oil firm argues it is not responsible

**Damien Gayle**  
Fri 7 Mar 2025 10.00 EST

His Royal Highness King Godwin Bebe Okpabi has carried bottles of water drawn from the wells of his homeland in the Niger delta to the high court in London.

It stinks. “This is the water that Shell has left for my people,” said the ruler of the Ogale community in Ogoniland, Nigeria. “This is poison, and they are spending millions of dollars to pay the best lawyers in the world so that they will not clean my land.”



For the past three and a half weeks, lawyers for Shell have argued at the high court that their client cannot be held responsible for an environmental catastrophe in Ogale, which has suffered from decades of spills and pollution from oil extraction.

The three and a half weeks of hearings, which ended on Friday, were a “preliminary issues trial”, heard by Mrs Justice Juliet May, to determine the scope of the legal issues to be decided at the case’s full trial, set for late 2026. Although the case is being heard by a British judge in a UK court, it will apply Nigerian law, and so May heard from a range of senior Nigerian lawyers about what the law is and how it should be applied.



Shell argues it cannot be held responsible. The company insists its Nigerian subsidiary, the Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), works closely with the Nigerian government to prevent spills and to respond to them and clean them up when they do occur.



“We strongly believe in the merits of our case. Oil is being stolen on an industrial scale in the Niger delta. This criminality is a major source of pollution and is the cause of the majority of spills in the Bille and Ogale claims,” a spokesperson for the company said.

But for Okpabi, the legal technicalities wrangled over in the court have been frustrating, “because as we are sitting here for these three weeks, people are dying at home,” he said.

“I’m not a lawyer, but as I sit down in the court and I see all the arguments going on, Shell trying to bring up arguments as if to try to see how they can wheedle their way out , it’s very painful. But I trust the judicial system here.”
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