About

General counsel Lucky Nengite, leads the legal team at Chevron Nigeria (CNL) comprised of 12 lawyers and three non-lawyers. Each CNL lawyer is assigned responsibility as the primary legal contact for specific functional groups such as joint venture operations, supply chain management, deepwater operations and junior lawyers in the department report to more senior lawyers. Ten lawyers are located at CNL’s headquarters in Lagos while two lawyers are based near CNL’s operations in the Niger Delta. While every lawyer is assigned a primary area of responsibility, each may be called upon to provide legal support to any CNL client group. There have been multiple changes within the legal department over the past two years. First, CNL’s prior general counsel moved to a position in Chevron’s Africa and Latin America Exploration and Production Company in the summer of 2017, resulting in Lucky Nengite’s appointment to the general counsel role. Additionally, a legal advisor, Chijioke Emole, who had been on multiple foreign assignments for 12 years returned to CNL in March 2018. Nengite says, ‘these events prompted significant modifications to each lawyer’s role within the department and required each member of the legal team to assume additional work and responsibility’. In terms of recent transactions, the Chevron Nigeria team has been busy concluding some important deals, including a US$780m financing package with a consortium of Nigerian banks to fund a multi-year drilling program both onshore and near-offshore in Nigeria. CNL’s legal department provided extensive support on the transaction, which has resulted in increased production, the replacement of diminishing reserves and addressing perennial challenges in funding the JV’s upstream activities. In addition, CNL, as well as four other International Oil Companies (IOCs) operating in Nigeria, negotiated and executed an agreement to recover its share of approximately US$5bn of historical cash call obligations owed to the IOCs by their joint venture partner. Nengite says, ‘these sums will be repaid from the additional revenues generated by incremental production, which was in turn enabled by the aforementioned outside funding transactions’. Additionally the team works well as a unit collaboratively working on projects and overcoming problems. Nengite describes the team as striving to ‘provide timely, business-focused and solution-oriented legal services, and achieving superior performance, safely and with integrity. This culture arises from the cohesiveness of a legal team that holds each other to high standards, utilizes the collective experience, diversity and skills of each member of the department, and puts CNL’s goals above any personal goals’.