Shell negotiates with Nigerians over spill

Shell officials have begun talks in Nigeria's southern city of Port Harcourt with representatives for the Bodo community on compensation and cleanup, five years after one of the worst oil spills in Nigeria's history.

Some experts say two oil spills that started in 2008 led to the largest loss of a mangrove habitat ever caused by an oil spill, affecting about 30,000 people in the Niger Delta area since then, according to London-based law firm Leigh Day.

"These people, since 2008 they are living on a creek of oil. You step out of the front door you see oil, breathe in oil and toxic fumes," said lawyer Daniel Leader of Leigh Day, a law firm that is representing about 15,000 people from the community that filed a lawsuit in 2012.

Royal Dutch Shell said a joint investigation team estimated 4100 barrels were lost in the two spills. That estimate is based on the initial investigations by representatives from the company and the local community, spokesman Jonathan French said on Monday.

"Having said all that, it doesn't matter how much was spilled because the compensation will be based on the financial loss that people have suffered because of the spill in the lagoon," he said. "And that is a matter of dispute between us and the claimant."

Leigh Day said that 15,000 fishermen and 31,000 inhabitants of 35 villages were affected in and around the Bodo lagoon and its associated waterways. The law firm says independent experts estimate between 500,000 and 600,000 barrels were spilled, devastating the environment that sits amid 90 square kilometres of mangroves, swamps and channels.

But Shell says such estimates are high.

Shell spokesman French said the company did not have access to the area to clean it up, and that not all oil spilled was a result of the company's operations. Shell blames most of the spills in the region on militant attacks or thieves tapping into pipelines to steal crude oil, which ends up on the black market.