OpeOluwani Akintayo
23 August 2017, Sweetcrude, Lagos — International oil major, ENI, has said 470,000 jobs were lost in the energy sector in three years.
The company’s Chief Executive, Claudio Descalzi revealed this in an interview published on its website, ENI.com.
According to the CEO, the oil market is without regulations at the moment, which had in turn affected jobs.
“The moment is difficult, and speculation is strong. There are speculators that are making maybe billions of dollars. It is a market without rules, which is destroying the primary industry and in the energy sector it has burned 470,000 jobs in three years. Millions of people are affected. Africa is exploding: the lack of diversification of the economies and the absence of wealth distribution is contributing to poverty and to migration flows,” he said.
According to Descalzi, the company is no longer optimistic about happenings in the oil sector in the short-term.
“The oil commodity has entered a difficult crisis. There is less confidence also among institutional investors, who normally have long positions and today they have become shorters”.
He said the industry has paved the way for guessers because hope is lost in OPEC.
“In this way space has been given to hedge funds and speculators. Probably they do not believe that OPEC is capable of taking radical initiatives. And today several sub-Saharan African countries are in serious difficulties,” he told the interviewer, Roberto Bongiorni.
The CEO said the geopolitical situation around the oil commodity “is explosive”, saying it “involves several OPEC countries. There is the shadow of U.S. shale gas which still today is facing over-production, and markets increasingly at the mercy of speculation are preventing low oil prices from emerging from a three-year crisis”.
