Board of Directors

Dr. Eduardo G. Pereira is a globally recognized authority in International Oil and Gas Law, Energy Policy, and Natural Resources Governance. He holds a PhD and LLM in Oil and Gas Law from the University of Aberdeen and has taught across leading universities worldwide.

With extensive experience advising governments, energy companies, and international institutions, Dr. Pereira specializes in petroleum contracts, local content frameworks, and regulatory systems. His academic and consulting work spans Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, positioning him as a leading voice in global energy governance and investment frameworks.

Dr Taiwo holds a Ph.D in International Oil and Gas Law, following four years of doctoral study as a College of Arts and Law scholar at the University of Birmingham. Her expertise is in upstream oil and gas agreements, being able to engage with the diverse range of issues that arise in the course of oil and gas agreements. These include contractual, fiscal and regulatory issues in licences, PSCs, joint ventures, long term gas agreements and decommissioning.

Additionally, Dr Taiwo is one of the contributors of the African Legal Support Facility’s (in connection with the African Development Bank) Academy Level 2 Oil & Gas Course Handbook. This handbook is used by leaders in National Oil and Gas Companies and other legal professionals in numerous African countries. One of her recent online publications is on decommissioning and residual liabilities, looking at the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on oil and gas companies.

Hervé Canarelli is an experienced energy professional with a background in the oil and gas sector, primarily associated with TotalEnergies (formerly Total). His career includes significant tenures at Total E&P Nigeria Limited and various Total subsidiaries across Africa, including Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (RDC), Togo, and Benin.

Hervé Canarelli have substantial expertise in exploration, production, or operational management within the African energy landscape, holding various roles across different regional entities

Dr. Moses Amadasun has progressed through all levels of the engineering profession—technician, technologist, engineer, teacher, and researcher. He began as a technician-in-training in 1974 with Nigeria’s Posts & Telecommunications (P&T) Department, later becoming a technologist in Microwave Radio Transmission Systems. After earning a First Class Honours degree in Electronics/Electrical Engineering from the University of Ife (1982), he worked as Area Engineer in Akure before shifting to academia at Bendel State University (now Ambrose Alli University) in 1984. He then completed a Ph.D. at Imperial College, London (1988), specializing in Digital Image Processing and Pattern Recognition with applications in remote sensing, robotics, and biomedical engineering.

Returning to Nigeria in 1992, Dr. Amadasun joined Elf Petroleum (now Total Energies), where he led the BIZNET satellite project and later managed telecoms, bandwidth expansion, and industry-wide OPTS initiatives. From 2006 to 2014, he developed TEPNG’s IPP project, retiring as General Manager, IPP Business. He has published influential papers, including a 2005 OWA conference paper that inspired Nigeria’s FOTON project, and a 2013 NIEEE inaugural lecture now a key reference on Nigeria’s electricity industry. He serves as Chairman of the Board of the International Center for Energy (ICE) West Africa, and is a member of NSE, Fellow of NIEEE, and Fellow of MDCIN. He is married with four children.

Kehinde Aina is a Sir Alexander Darnley Award nominee and Managing Partner at Aina Blankson LP, one of Africa’s leading international law firms. A renowned international arbitrator and mediator, he founded the Lagos Multi-Door Courthouse (Africa’s first court-connected ADR center) and later initiated the establishment of the Supreme Court Mediation Centre and the Court of Appeal Mediation Centre in Nigeria. In 2010, the World Bank appointed him as a regional consultant covering ten countries, and in 2015 he became a consultant to the United Nations.

His extensive transactional experience includes representing over fifty of eighty-nine Nigerian banks during the banking sector consolidation, leading the merger of nine commercial banks, and advising on major transactions such as the Nova Capital $2 billion capital raise, the R500 million golf estate acquisition in South Africa, the $350 million Atlantic LNG project, the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development Pipeline mediation, the £20 billion Shell Petroleum oil spillage negotiations, and numerous arbitrations under ICC, LCIA, and Singapore Arbitration Rules. He is also the author of two books on mediation and commercial arbitration.

Engr. Obembe spent 35 years at Total E&P, serving as Engineer, GM Supply Chain, EGM Technical Services & Nigerian Content, and finally as Director of Oil & Gas Commercial. His experience spans Nigeria, France, and the Netherlands. Most notably, he pioneered the establishment and entrenchment of Local Content—not only within Total but across Nigeria’s petroleum sector.

He was an active leader in the conversations that led to the Nigerian Content Act of 2010 and continues to serve as an expert voice on effective local content development and capacity building across Africa’s energy sectors.