According to senior officials from Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources and others in the OML 11 joint venture, the licence for Oil Mining Lease 11 has neither been revoked nor withdrawn from the SPDC as was widely reported in the local media last week.

The report by Nigeria’s Punch newspaper on Monday said that the officials explained that the directive from President Muhammadu Buhari to the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, the parent firm of NPDC, was that the operatorship of the block should be taken over by the NNPC.

The report added that aside from the fact that the process of getting back the licence for such oil block was tedious, the joint venture partners in OML 11 were not just NPDC and SPDC.

The officials stated that two other international oil companies, Total and Agip, were also partners in the oil block.