Stolen info SBM Offshore about alleged $ 250 million fraud

The share price of SBM Offshore, a Dutch company involved in the service industry for oil & gas, was hit hard last Friday on fresh allegations about corruption. The possible size makes it one of the largest recent cases of bribery.

The Dutch magazine Quote had published new information regarding this matter on its website.

The reader can use Google translate on the text, I have tried to translate a few paragraphs:


Stolen info SBM Offshore about $ 250 million fraud and involvement top executives

On the internet circulates a very detailed document that gives information about large scale alleged bribes by Schiedam (Netherlands) based Billion Euro company SBM Offshore, a supplier to the oil and gas industry. SBM confirms to Quote that this information comes from within the company. "It was stolen by a former employee who wanted to blackmail us."

A former employee of SBM has a large amount of information about possible fraud cases by employees of SBM Offshore on the Internet, which contains bribery of officials in Angola, Equatorial Guinea (both located in West Africa), Brazil, Malaysia, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Italy. Also, excerpts from transcripts of recordings published showing that (members of) the Board of Directors and (members of) the Board of Trustees for many years are aware of the malpractices. The top of the company would deliberately try to conceal these cases. In total, between 2005 and 2011, $ 250 million is spent on bribes.

The spokesman of SBM lets Quote know that this information actually comes from the internal investigation that runs inside the company. "This information has been obtained illegally by an angry former employee who tried to extort SBM. We are engaged in legal action against this person. This information is placed out of context. As the investigations of the American and Dutch judiciary are still running, with which we are fully cooperating, we can not further give any information."

 The text can be found in the following Wikipedia article, an old revision dated October 18, 2013.

The link to Malaysia can be found in the following paragraph:


"4.1 MALAYSIA - Payments to Barnado Limited and Delcom Limited totalling approximately US$10,000,000, paid on (ie. by way of bribes) to “MISC” for the Kikeh FPSO (leased to US oil company Murphy)."


If these allegations by the formed employee are indeed true or not, I guess we have to wait until the investigations by the relevant authorities are finished.

More information about this project can be found here:

FLOATING PRODUCTION STORAGE AND OFFLOADING (FPSO)

"The Kikeh field is located 120km northwest of the island of Labuan, offshore Sabah, East Malaysia in water depths of around 1,300m. Murphy Sabah Oil Company operates Kikeh on behalf of partner Petronas Carigali.

The FPSO Kikeh will be located in 1,350m of water. It will be owned by MDFT Labaun and operated by MDPX Sdn Bhd, two joint ventures between SBM and Misc Berhad. The converted tanker was built in 1974 It has an overall length of 337m a breadth of 54.6m and a deadweight of 273,000t. It has a storage capacity of two million barrels."