Court Correspondent :
The High Court (HC) yesterday declared two Niko deals signed with Bapex and Petrobangla illegal and ordered the government to confiscate all the properties of Canadian Oil and Gas Company.
The assets will not be returned to Niko until the corruption and compensation cases against the company are disposed of by lower courts, the HC said.
The HC bench of Justices Naima Haider and Saifur Rahman delivered the verdict following a writ petition, Moin Ghani, a lawyer for Bapex and Petrobangla, told the media.
Niko signed the deals – joint venture agreement and gas purchase and sales agreement (GPSA) – with Bapex and Petrobangla in 2003 and 2006.
Joint venture agreement was signed on October 16, 2003 to develop two gas fields while GPSA was inked in December 2006 to sell the gas extracted from Feni gas field.
Shamsul Alam, energy adviser to the Consumers Association of Bangladesh (CAB), filed the writ petition with the HC last year, seeking an order to declare illegal the deals, as they were procured through corruption.”Assets of JVA and GPSA shall revert back to the state,” Moin Ghani said.
“We also find the assets of Niko Resources in Bangladesh have been obtained through a corrupt scheme and are to be treated as proceeds of crime,” Moin Ghani added quoting the verdict as saying.
On May 9, 2016, the High Court issued a rule asking the government to explain as to why the two joint venture agreements should not be declared illegal.
