Deals for oilfields can be as opaque as the stuff that is pumped from them. But when partners fall out and go to court, light is sometimes shed on the bargaining process-and what it exposes is not always pretty. That is certainly true in the tangled case of OPL245, a massive Nigerian offshore block with as much as 9 billion barrels of oil-enough to keep all of Africa supplied for seven years.After years of legal tussles, in 2011 Shell, in partnership with eni of Italy, paid a total of $1.3 billion for the block. The Nigerian government acted as a conduit for directing most of that money to the block's original owner, a shadowy local company called Malabu Oil and Gas. Two middlemen hired by Malabu, one Nigerian, one Azerbaijani, then sued the firm separately in London-in the High Court and in an arbitration tribunal, respectively-claiming unpaid fees for brokering the deal.
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机译：油田交易可能像从油田中抽出的东西一样不透明。但是，当合伙人陷入困境并上法庭时，有时会为讨价还价过程提供启示，而它所暴露的并不总是那么漂亮。在混杂的OPL245案例中，这确实是正确的.OPL245是尼日利亚的一个大型海上区块，拥有高达90亿桶的石油，足以将整个非洲的石油供应保持七年.2011年，由于多年的法律纠纷，壳牌与意大利的埃尼（EII）为该区块总共支付了13亿美元。尼日利亚政府充当了将大部分资金导向该区块原始所有者的管道，该原始所有者是一家名叫Malabu Oil and Gas的阴暗当地公司。马拉布（Malabu）雇用的两名中间人，一名尼日利亚人，一名阿塞拜疆人，然后分别在伦敦的高等法院和一个仲裁庭对这家公司提起诉讼，要求他们为代理该交易支付未付的费用。
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