From Kemi Yesufu,Abuja
Executive-Secretary of the Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI), Waziri Adio, has put the estimated amount lost by Nigeria through undeclared crude at $39 billion.
The amount is for 359,916 million barrels of crude oil sold between 2011 and 2014.
Adio, who spoke at the investigative hearing of the Abdulrazak Namdas-led Adhoc Committee investigating the $17 billion allegedly stolen from undeclared crude oil and liquefied gas sale in the international market, however, asked to withdraw a submission earlier made to the committee by the agency.
He explained that NEITI based the submission on inadequate information, resulting in major errors in figures presented in the document.
This was as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was not able to tell the committee why only $7 billion out of $42.7 billion proceeds of crude oil sale between 2010 and 2014 was made available to the Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) for sharing between tiers of government during the three-year period.
Also at the hearing, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) admitted submitting grossly inadequate information of a shortfall of $14 billion of crude proceeds for the period under review to the committee.
NNPC’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), Bello Rabiu, tried providing explanation to what the committee said were incomplete details of crude sales in which over 200 million barrels could not be unaccounted for in 2011.
Rabiu apologised and promised to provide an updated report while he denied complicity in the wrong document.
During the hearing, it was also discovered that N660.9 million was lost during the same period from crude oil-related taxes due to the inability of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) to carry out due diligence on the NNPC and it’s subsidiaries.
CBN’s claim that it has no knowledge of details of payments on crude oil sales into its accounts with JP Morgan Chase, New York, was summarily dismissed by NNPC which disclosed that details about quantity and period of lifting of crude were always made available to the apex bank.
Jack Ukitetu, who represented CBN at the hearing, said the bank only warehouses accounts of government agencies and, as such, do not have the capacity to have details of payments made into the accounts.
He further explained that the apex bank has no control over such accounts and added that it can only act on mandates given by the owners of the accounts for disbursement in which category the $42.7 billion proceed fell into.
On its part, the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) said it has no capacity to adequately ascertain the total crude oil lifted for export.
Deputy Controller of Tariff and Trade, Ayalogu Anthony, who spoke on behalf of NCS, said the agency does not have a vessel that can be used for monitoring, lifting and loading of crude into vessels.
According to him, personnel of the NCS can only witness lifting and loading when invited by the oil companies.
“We can only depend on declarations on manifest submitted by companies and we issue certificate of clearance, but, we don’t issue clearance for vessels we don’t participate in their inspection,” he said.