Months later the government invited Shell and ExxonMobil to bid on OPL 245.

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Months later the government invited Shell and ExxonMobil (nyse: XOM - news - people ) to bid on OPL 245.

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Last August Malabu sued Shell, accusing it of colluding with Nigerian officials to snatch its juicy oil prospecting license, OPL 245, a giant block in the deepwater area of the Niger Delta, with estimated reserves of more than 1 billion barrels.

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Early that year Abacha's petroleum minister, Dauzia Loya Etete, awarded himself a license to develop OPL 245 and set up Malabu as the license holder. (Though technically not an owner, Etete is widely believed to control Malabu.) After Abacha's dictatorship collapsed, the civilian administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo set up a panel to review oil licenses and revoked a number of them.

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