The extraordinary legal afterlife of the Shell-Eni OPL 245 affair has produced another important development.
The detailed judgment behind the acquittal of former Milan prosecutors Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro has now been published—and it overturns the proposition that their handling of potentially favourable material in the Shell-Eni Nigeria prosecution amounted to a criminal refusal to perform their duties.
The extraordinary legal afterlife of the Shell-Eni OPL 245 affair has produced another important development.
Italy’s Court of Cassation has published the reasoning behind its decision to clear former Milan prosecutors Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro, who had themselves been convicted after the collapse of the enormous corruption prosecution involving Shell, Eni and Nigeria’s controversial OPL 245 offshore oil licence.
The decision is significant because the two prosecutors had previously been convicted twice—at first instance and on appeal—and sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment for refusing to perform official acts.
Italy’s highest court overturned those convictions on 18 June 2026.
Now we know in much greater detail why.
In judgment No. 34812/2026, whose reasons were filed on 29 September, the Court of Cassation concluded that the action the prosecutors were accused of failing to perform was not legally mandatory and involved prosecutorial discretion. It therefore did not constitute the criminal offence for which they had been convicted. Giurisprudenza Penale
That provides an important new chapter in a story that has been running for well over a decade.
The prosecution that turned on its prosecutors
The origins lie in the notorious OPL 245 transaction.
In 2011 Shell and Eni participated in agreements involving the Nigerian government concerning rights to the enormous deep-water offshore block.
The transaction subsequently became the subject of international investigations and allegations that money paid in connection with the deal ultimately benefited Nigerian officials and other individuals.
Shell and Eni denied corruption.
Italian prosecutors eventually brought one of the largest international corporate corruption cases ever tried in Italy.
Then, on 17 March 2021, the Milan Tribunal acquitted Shell, Eni and the individual defendants. The acquittals subsequently became final after prosecutors withdrew their appeal. Shell maintains that there was never evidence of a corrupt agreement or corrupt payments. Shell
But the story did not end there.
Instead, attention turned to the conduct of the prosecutors themselves.
Accused of withholding favourable material
De Pasquale and Spadaro were accused of failing to make available material that could have assisted the defendants.
The controversy included chats and other material originating from another investigative strand being handled by fellow prosecutor Paolo Storari.
The accusation was serious: that information potentially favourable to defendants in the OPL 245 trial had not been acquired and disclosed when it should have been.
A Brescia court convicted the prosecutors, and in October 2025 an appeals court upheld their eight-month sentences.
The Brescia appeal judgment took a particularly strong position. According to ANSA’s January 2026 report on the reasons, the appeal court characterised the failure to deposit favourable material as a conscious refusal to carry out an obligatory and urgent act. ANSA.it
The Court of Cassation has now rejected the criminal-law foundation of that conclusion.
What Italy’s highest court actually decided
This is where the newly published judgment becomes particularly important.
The Cassation Court stressed that the case before it was not a general inquiry into whether every aspect of the prosecutors’ behaviour was correct.
Nor was it questioning the prosecutor’s obligation to act loyally and impartially.
The much narrower legal question was whether the particular conduct amounted to the specific criminal offence of refusing to perform an official act under Article 328 of the Italian Criminal Code.
The answer was no.
The court concluded that the act the prosecutors supposedly refused to perform was not a mandatory act required by the relevant provisions of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure. Instead, it involved what the court described as delicate discretionary assessments belonging to the prosecutor responsible for the case. Giurisprudenza Penale
That distinction is crucial.
A prosecutor may have duties of fairness and impartiality, but according to the Cassation Court it does not follow that every disputed prosecutorial decision constitutes a criminal refusal to perform an official duty.
As the court’s reasoning makes clear, not every possible breach of professional correctness is itself a crime. Giurisprudenza Penale
The disputed chats
The judgment goes further.
According to the published summary of the Cassation decision, the failure to acquire the chats identified by Storari did not involve decisive exculpatory evidence, and the decision not to acquire them was not improper in the criminal-law sense at issue before the court. Giurisprudenza Penale
The court also found that there had been no criminally relevant act of refusal or attributable omission by De Pasquale and Spadaro.
Their position had effectively been referred upwards to the Milan chief prosecutor and deputy chief prosecutor, who did not override it. Giurisprudenza Penale
That is a markedly different interpretation from that reached by the lower courts.
Two convictions wiped away
This was not a retrial producing a reduced sentence.
The Court of Cassation annulled the convictions without remitting the case for another trial, using the formula perché il fatto non sussiste—essentially, because the alleged criminal act did not exist.
The judgment therefore brought the criminal proceedings against the prosecutors to an end. Giurisprudenza Penale
Global Investigations Review now reports the decision under the succinct headline:
“Shell-Eni prosecutors didn’t breach legal duties.” globalinvestigationsreview.com
That is broadly accurate as a description of the criminal-law finding, although the judgment itself contains an important nuance: the Cassation Court deliberately distinguished the question of criminal liability from a broader assessment of prosecutorial conduct.
That distinction should not be lost.
An extraordinary reversal
The sequence is remarkable.
First, Shell, Eni and the individual defendants were prosecuted over one of the biggest alleged international corruption schemes to reach an Italian courtroom.
They were acquitted.
Then two of the prosecutors who brought the case were themselves prosecuted over their handling of potentially favourable material.
They were convicted.
Their convictions were upheld on appeal.
And now Italy’s highest court has overturned those convictions completely.
Reuters reported after the June ruling that the prosecutor-general before the Court of Cassation had himself sought the full acquittal of De Pasquale and Spadaro. Euronext
But this does not rewrite the OPL 245 record
Care is required here.
The Cassation decision does not convict Shell or Eni of anything.
Their Italian criminal acquittals remain final.
Equally, the new judgment should not be read as a judicial declaration resolving every historical controversy surrounding OPL 245.
The Court of Cassation was deciding whether De Pasquale and Spadaro committed a particular criminal offence through their handling of material during the prosecution.
It concluded they did not.
That is a much narrower proposition.
The underlying OPL 245 documentary history—including the negotiations, payment structures, internal corporate communications and differing interpretations of what participants knew—continues to exist independently of the eventual criminal outcomes.
Indeed, an extensive collection of documents from the Milan proceedings remains publicly archived by the OPL245 Papers project. OPL245 Papers
Shell and Eni are back in OPL 245
There is another reason why this historical litigation remains relevant in 2026.
OPL 245 is no longer merely an old courtroom story.
Earlier this year the Nigerian government reached an agreement enabling the former OPL 245 acreage to move forward under Nigeria’s Petroleum Industry Act.
The former licence has been converted into two petroleum mining leases and two petroleum prospecting licences, involving Eni as operator alongside the Nigerian national oil company and Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company.
Shell describes the licences as part of its expanding Nigerian deep-water portfolio. Shell
Thus an oil block that spent years generating investigations, criminal proceedings, civil claims and international controversy is once again part of Shell and Eni’s commercial future.
The latest chapter, not necessarily the last word
The newly released Cassation judgment closes one remarkable subsidiary chapter of OPL 245.
Fabio De Pasquale and Sergio Spadaro stand acquitted.
Their previous convictions have been annulled.
Italy’s highest court has found that the prosecutorial decision at issue involved discretion rather than a mandatory legal act whose refusal constituted a crime. Giurisprudenza Penale
That does not reverse Shell and Eni’s acquittals.
It does something different.
It means that the prosecutors who unsuccessfully pursued Shell and Eni have now themselves emerged from the criminal justice system without convictions.
For anyone attempting to write a definitive history of OPL 245, that distinction matters.
The case has produced an extraordinary succession of allegations, investigations, trials, acquittals, prosecutions of prosecutors, convictions of those prosecutors—and finally the annulment of those convictions by Italy’s highest court.
And after all of that, Shell and Eni are once again preparing to develop the Nigerian acreage at the centre of the entire affair.
Sources: Global Investigations Review, 1 October 2026; Italian Court of Cassation, Sixth Criminal Section, Judgment No. 34812/2026, reasons filed 29 September 2026; Reuters; Giurisprudenza Penale; Shell plc; Eni; ANSA; OPL245 Papers. globalinvestigationsreview.com
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