Cape Town (Platts)--25Jan2011/608 am EST/1108 GMT

Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth said Tuesday they had filed an official complaint against Shell for breaches of responsibility for oil spills in Nigeria and causing environmental degradation.

"The organisations claim that Shell's use of discredited and misleading information to blame the majority of oil pollution on saboteurs in its Niger Delta operations has breached the OECD guidelines for multi-national enterprises," a joint statement said.

The complaint has been filed with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development which has often been used by environmental and human rights groups as the forum in which to lodge complaints against multinational companies.

Shell will Wednesday come under scrutiny for its environmental and human rights impacts during a hearing in the Dutch parliament on the company's activities in Nigeria, the statement added.

"Shell's figures are totally lacking in credibility," said Audrey Gaughran of Amnesty International. "Widespread oil pollution is a key problem caused by oil industry in the Niger Delta, but the oil spill investigation system is totally lacking in independence."

Despite repeated requests, Shell has so far failed to make clear the basis for the figures it has published and how the data were gathered, the statement said.

"Several studies have placed the bulk of the blame for oil spills in the Niger Delta on the doorsteps of the oil companies; particularly Shell. It should take its responsibility and clean up the mess it made in our country," said Nnimmo Bassey, Director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria.

In a briefing note on the company's operations in Nigeria in 2008, Shell said that more that 75% of 221 cases of oil spill recorded in 2007 were due to sabotage of its pipelines, flowlines and manifolds, resulting in oil spills totaling 18,500 barrels.

Nigerian armed groups and vandals often drill into wellheads and pipelines to steal crude and products.

Since the BP oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico last year, there has been increased focus on incidents of oil spills by companies operating in Nigeria.

--Jacinta Moran, jacinta_moran@platts.com

Similar stories appear in Oilgram News. See more information at http://bit.ly/OilgramNews