In early November the government signed a deal giving Oranto Petroleum, a little-known Nigerian company, the exploration rights for an onshore block in western Gambia, know as Block Lower River. No oil is currently produced in The Gambia, although in June 2004 the president, Yahya Jammeh, claimed that "large quantities" had been discovered offshore. Details of the offshore find have not been released, and experts are sceptical of its existence. The chairman of Oranto is a Nigerian millionaire, Prince Arthur Eze, and the company is reported to have exploration rights in Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and Liberia. The company carried out a preliminary review in The Gambia in mid-2008 and eventually signed a deal with the president, who is also minister of petroleum, almost two-and-a-half years later. The long delay suggests that prospects for the block are not highly significant. At the ceremony to sign the contract, the Gambian leader said that his government was very transparent and that the agreement must also be transparent. No details of the deal have been released, to the knowledge of the Economist Intelligence Unit. Elsewhere in the nascent oil sector the deputy minister of petroleum and mineral resources, Teneng Ba-Jaiteh, said that a seismic data survey of offshore blocks was being carried out by the Nigerian-based African Petroleum at a cost of US$12m and that there was interest in the remaining four offshore blocks, with negotiations at an advanced stage for two of them.