Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) has said it, along with billionaire partner Lakshmi Mittal, will fulfil the $6 billion infrastructure investment commitment made to Nigeria for winning lucrative oil blocks.
ONGC Mittal Energy (OMEL), the joint venture of ONGC Videsh and steel czar-owned Mittal Investment Sarl, however, set no timeline for investing in building a 1,80,000-barrel-a-day refinery, a 2,000 Mw power plant, and a railway line connecting eastern and western Nigeria.
"OMEL had made certain commitments (in 2005 to get oil blocks) and surely, we will be meeting those commitments," ONGC Chairman and Managing Director R S Sharma told reporters.
Nigeria had accused the joint venture of not investing even a single penny and had begun a probe on the allocation of oil blocks to it.
"There were no timelines set (for making the investments) and I don't think we had faltered on the timelines," Sharma said.
Last week, Emmanuel O Egbogah, special adviser to the Nigerian President, on a visit to India had stated that OMEL must keep its "commitments" if it wanted to explore in the oil-rich African nation. "They had signed an agreement committing those investments but nothing has happened so far," he said.
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OMEL had in 2005 won rights to explore in OPL-279 and OPL-285 after committing $6 billion spending in the core sector of Nigeria. It paid a signature bonus of $50 million for OPL-285 and $75 million for OPL-279.
In November 2006, it paid $100 million to win yet another block, OPL-246, which the then Nigerian government had wrested from local company South Atlantic Petroleum (Sapetro) before allocating it to OMEL.