OPL 245, the Largest Foreign Bribery Trial and Its Reverse Side

Whoever opens the documents of the OPL 245 case finds thirteen years of records, four Public Prosecutor’s Offices, three levels of judgment, two complaints in Paris and more names than an ordinary memory can hold. This part is meant to keep the reader from getting lost. It tells the case in twelve dates and says, for each statement, whether it is established by a record, whether someone declares it, or whether it is a reading by the writer. The guarantor of this site is a civil party in the Milan trial of the so-called conspiracy and the author of the complaint to the OECD of 26 August 2026; the reader should know this before beginning.

1. April 1998. The licence

The offshore oil block OPL 245 is one of the richest in Nigeria. In 1998, in the last months of Sani Abacha’s military dictatorship, the petroleum minister Dan Etete awards it to a company set up a few days earlier, Malabu Oil & Gas, which is attributable to Etete himself. In the following years the licence is revoked, reassigned to Shell and returned to Malabu through a settlement; in 2011 it is still in the hands of the man who had awarded it to himself. In the decisions cited these steps are not disputed; the dispute, in the trials, concerned what the companies knew.¹

2. 29 April 2011. The 1.3 billion

Eni and Shell buy the licence. They pay approximately USD 1.3 billion to the Nigerian government, which passes most of it on to Malabu: approximately eight hundred million reach the company’s Nigerian accounts in August 2011. Of that money, approximately three hundred million stay with Etete; more than five hundred and twenty go to the companies and bureaux de change of Aliyu Abubakar — an intermediary whom the organisations report as being known in Nigeria as “Mr Corruption” — and become cash, distributed without traceability to recipients who are for the most part unknown. The trial that will follow is, for the complaint, “the largest foreign bribery trial ever held”, and the measure is the amount of the alleged bribe. The Milan Court reconstructed these steps and the judgment of acquittal does not deny them. It denies something else: that the two companies knew, at the moment of paying, that the money would be used to bribe.²

3. 9 September 2013. The criminal complaint

Three organisations, Re:Common (Italy), The Corner House (United Kingdom) and Global Witness (United Kingdom), file a criminal complaint with the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office. On 4 November 2013 the Office registers proceedings no. 54772/13 against Eni and others for foreign bribery; on 4 June 2014 it notifies Eni. The investigation, and then the prosecution at trial, are led by Fabio De Pasquale, in Milan since the years of Mani pulite, and Sergio Spadaro. On 30 July 2014, according to the records referred to in the complaint, a former Eni executive dismissed the year before, Vincenzo Armanna, who had followed the OPL 245 negotiations in Nigeria, presents himself to the public prosecutors without anyone having summoned him and accuses the company’s top management. His statements lead to the registration as suspects of the chief executive then in office, appointed by the Government in May 2014, and of his predecessor.³

4. 2015-2016. The “conspiracy against Eni”

Two days before presenting himself to the public prosecutors, on 28 July 2014, Armanna had been filmed without his knowledge in the Rome office of a businessman, at a meeting with Eni’s external lawyer Piero Amara and two political figures; Amara would say in 2019, under examination, that the recording had been made “to blackmail Armanna” and that he had agreed it with an Eni executive, who denies it. From January 2015 three anonymous complaints reach the Trani Public Prosecutor’s Office and the scene is turned upside down: the conspiracy, they say, is against Eni, hatched by troublesome directors and executives of the company, by Armanna himself and by his lawyer. In July 2016 the Syracuse Public Prosecutor’s Office issues notices of investigation for defamation against two independent directors and an Eni executive; in September 2016 eight magistrates of that Office report to the governing bodies of the judiciary the outside pressure on their files; in February 2018 Amara and the Syracuse public prosecutor are arrested for judicial corruption, and plea-bargain. That the “conspiracy against Eni” was fabricated to protect the top management from the OPL 245 investigation has been, since 2023, the charge brought by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office in a trial still pending, in which Eni appears as injured party and, at the request of the civil party, as the party civilly liable; the guarantor of this site is the only civil party to have joined the proceedings against it. A charge, until there is a judgment; the defendants are presumed innocent.⁴

5. 20 December 2017. The committal for trial

The Milan preliminary hearing judge commits Eni, Shell and thirteen individuals for trial, among them Eni’s chief executive then in office, his predecessor and Dan Etete. On 20 September 2018 two intermediaries in the deal, tried separately under the fast-track procedure (rito abbreviato), are convicted at first instance and sentenced to four years; the Court of Appeal will acquit them on 24 June 2021, without opposition from the Prosecutor General’s Office. The main trial opens on 14 May 2018 before the Seventh Criminal Division of the Milan Court, presided over by Marco Tremolada, and lasts almost three years.⁵

6. 17 March 2021. The acquittal

The Court acquits all the defendants “because the act did not occur”. The reasons, filed on 9 June 2021, hold it unproven that the two companies knew of the corrupt destination of the money, find Armanna unreliable, use against him the video of 28 July 2014 and reproach the public prosecutors for not having filed it. On 19 July 2022 the Milan Prosecutor General’s Office withdraws the appeal — through a deputy other than the two public prosecutors of the trial, who had asked to take part in the appeal and had not been allowed to — and the acquittal becomes final. In the Phase 4 report on Italy, adopted on 13 October 2022, the OECD Working Group questioned whether the interpretation of the offence followed in that judgment, and in other recent acquittals, was consistent with the Convention, and described as “unfortunate” some of the expressions used by the deputy prosecutor general in withdrawing the appeal; with two subsequent judgments, the first of 31 May 2022 (Sixth Division, no. 28988/2022), the Court of Cassation changed course on the point of law that had decided the trial, as the 2024 follow-up report records.⁶

7. 3 June 2021. The public prosecutors on trial

Six days before the Court files its reasons, the Brescia Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has jurisdiction over Milan magistrates, registers De Pasquale and Spadaro as suspects for refusal to perform official acts. The proceedings arise from the statements of a colleague, Paolo Storari, who since 2020 had been conducting the investigation into the “conspiracy” and who in February-March 2021, at the last hearings of OPL 245, had asked them to bring into the trial some chats extracted from Armanna’s telephone; the two had informed the Chief Prosecutor and the Deputy Chief Prosecutor in writing of their assessment not to acquire them, leaving the decision to them. On 8 October 2024 the Brescia Court sentences them to eight months; on 16 October 2025 the Court of Appeal upholds the conviction. In the meantime De Pasquale stepped down, in May 2024, as head of the department that had built OPL 245; according to the press, after the judgment of the Court of Cassation he left the judiciary.⁷

8. 2020. The doormat and the second current

While the OPL 245 trial moves towards judgment, within the investigation into the “conspiracy” there occurs what the complaints call “the second current”. On 20 February 2020 an external lawyer of Eni files with the Public Prosecutor’s Office, on behalf of the company’s head of legal affairs, a package which the executive says he received anonymously (a first envelope, he recounts, he had found under the doormat of his home and destroyed). Inside: bank statements attributing millions in the Cayman Islands to a former Eni executive, a sheet of foreign accounts, the screenshot of a chat about the payment of a witness. By October 2020 the Bank of Italy establishes that the statements are false. The Dubai account written on that sheet, however, is real — and it will resurface in 2021 in a 2019 chat found on Armanna’s telephone, handed over to the public prosecutors in November 2020. Who fabricated the package has not been established in any known decision. For the executive, the Public Prosecutor’s Office requested in March 2026 that the case be dismissed for lack of intent; the civil party has opposed, and the hearing is set for 15 December 2026. In July 2025 a report of the Guardia di Finanza, filed in the record of the Milan trial, described engagements and invoices from which the complaint infers that from July 2019 Eni allegedly financed, through two law firms, a private intelligence apparatus aimed at its own accusers. To read these papers as an operation to overturn the investigation is the thesis of the civil party and of the complaints, an inference declared as such.⁸

9. 9 June 2025. The organisations in Paris

Three organisations, The Corner House, Hawkmoth (Netherlands) and HEDA Resource Centre (Nigeria), ask the Chair of the OECD Working Group for a review of Italy under Article 5 of the Convention. They bring sixty “red flags” from 2013 onwards: from the Trani complaints to the withdrawal of the appeal, from the trial of the public prosecutors to the hollowing out of the anti-corruption unit of the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office. The Chair replies, according to the organisations, that the review must wait for the end of the trial of the two magistrates; on 7 July 2025 the organisations submit an amended version, with forty-nine red flags, which takes that reply into account.⁹

10. 18 June 2026. The Court of Cassation

The Sixth Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation quashes without remand the convictions of De Pasquale and Spadaro “because the act did not occur”. The reasons, filed on 29 September 2026, state that the obligation to file those chats did not exist, that the communication to the heads of the office was “an act not of refusal but of objective, due, transparency”, and that the acquisition requested by the colleague would have been — that one, indeed — “undue”. Five years and two convictions had passed since the registration in Brescia. The judgment does not mention the OECD and does not judge the OPL 245 trial: it concerns the offence of refusal to perform official acts, and that alone. The full Italian text, the English translation and the commentary are on this site.¹⁰

11. 26 August 2026. The civil party’s complaint

Avv. Luca Santa Maria files with the OECD Secretariat a complaint under Article 5, independent of that of the organisations: forty-eight paragraphs and thirty-three annexes, all judicial records. The complaint retraces in twenty-three dated moments, from 2014 to 2026, what the complaints call the interference; it counts ten investigations which, as far as the complainant can tell from the records in his possession, were never opened; it makes four requests, among them ten verifiable questions to be put to Italy. On 9 September a Synthesis in twenty points follows; on 11 September the Chair of the Working Group replies that the Group and the lead examiners for Italy, Germany and the United States, will consider the complaint in December 2026, together with Italy’s follow-up report; on 9 October the complainant transmits the reasons of the Court of Cassation with a full English translation and a covering note. All the documents are collected on the case page; the complaint, the Synthesis and the note are also available in English.¹¹

12. December 2026. The calendar

In October 2026 Italy must report in writing to the Working Group on the implementation of five recommendations of 2022; in December 2026 the Group will examine that report and, with it, the two complaints. In the same month, in Milan, the hearing on the opposition to the dismissal of the case against the executive who filed the package is scheduled, and the judgment in the “conspiracy” trial is expected, the prosecution’s closing speech having been delivered on 25 June 2026. In Paris the Italian State will not have to answer for what its judges decided, but for the conditions in which they decided it; the documents collected on this page are those with which it is asked to do so.¹²

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a collective byline · guarantor: Avv. Luca Santa Maria · 27 October 2026