NLNG boss, Omotowa, appointed Shell VP

By Adewale Sanyaolu

THE outgoing Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Nigerian Liq­uefied Natural Gas (NLNG), Babs Omo­towa, has been appointed by Shell Inter­national into the Global Upstream Leader­ship Team as Vice President (S&E).

NLNG in a statement by its General Manager, External Relations, Kudo Eresia- Eke, said Omotowa, who will be complet­ing his time at the helm of affairs at NLNG on September 1, 2016, will report to the Upstream Director across Shell’s Conven­tional, Unconventional and Deepwater global businesses.

‘‘Omotowa leaves Nigeria LNG Limited in a stronger position and well positioned for the next chapter of the company’s growth. He will take great pride and sat­isfaction in his numerous achievements including consolidating the company’s position as a reliable supplier of LNG and major player in the global LNG market, restarting the Train seven expansion pro­gram and with NLNG becoming ranked as the number one home-grown company in Nigeria.

Through sheer courage, integrity and transparency, he brought back credibility into the relationship with government at a very crucial time in the company’s his­tory, and his principled stand on payment of taxes yielded the now famous Govern­ment bailout funds. During his tenure at Nigeria LNG Limited, the company earned in excess of $40billion in revenue and returned over $22billion to Nigeria in dividend, taxes, feedgas purchases, etc. The company under his watch became the highest corporate tax paying organisation in Sub-Sahara Africa, and a major con­tributor to the Nigerian economy,’’ NLNG said

The statement explains that the com­pany, under his leadership, secured $1.6 billion financing for the construction and delivery of six very modern Dual Fuel Die­sel Electric (DFDE) vessels, setting a new ground breaking standard for Nigerian Content; with the training of 600 Nige­rians in ship construction and repairs, ensuring Nigerian companies, for the first time, export $10 million worth of goods and services to Korea for the ship building, and facilitating a dry dock project by a Ni­gerian consortium.

‘‘From expanding and deepening do­mestic LPG market to building ultra-mod­ern engineering laboratories across the country, launching of $1 billion NLNG Vendors Financing Scheme, providing Bonny Kingdom with a 25-year master plan and N3 billion yearly contribution for development, etc. Omotowa initiated several programmes that have garnered at­tention as both national and international models. This is in addition to his securing N60 billion support of the Board to part fund the Bonny-Bodo Road linking Bonny Island to the mainland as part of the com­pany’s CSR initiative”.