ABUJA – Senate of the Federal Republic yesterday resolved to invite the Executive Secretary of NEITI, Waziri Adio, to brief them on alleged over N1 trillion missing from the country’s natural mineral resources earnings and the cause of such leakages.
The summon was predicated on a motion “The urgent need for the Senate to look into the NEITI 2013 Oil, Gas and Solid Minerals Audit Report, by Tijjani Yahaya Kaufa (Zamfara North).
According to Sen. Yahaya, the audit report shows that $5$.07 billion and $33.86 billion were realised from hydrocarbons industry and solid minerals sector respectively.
He was however worried that $3.8 billion and $358.3 billion were yet to be remitted by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its subsidiaries in 2013.
The outstanding payments, Sen. Yahaya further noted, were dues from unpaid consideration from divested Oil Mineral Leasing (OML) from NNPC to NPDC and cash call refunds by the National Petroleum Investment and Management Services (NAPIMS).
He further told the Senate that between 2005 and 2013, the N12.9 billion paid the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas (NLNG) to NNPC was not remitted to the federation account.
Moreso, the NEITI report showed that in the period under review, Nigeria lost $5.966 billion and N20.4 billion from operation of Offshore Processing Agreements (OPA) by NNPC, crude oil swap and theft among others.
Also, $599.98 million was reported in the audit as underpayments to the federation from petroleum profit taxes and royalties by oil and gas companies as a result of the use of different pricing methodology by the government.
Sen. Yahaya also regretted that despite several similar reports of fraudulent activities in our Oil and Gas Industry, government over the years has not come out with any clearly defined action to recover such squandered monies and avert the trend.
“The federation is not fully taking advantage of its solid minerals endowment on account of unclear legal and taxation regime, inaccuracy of production data and non-transfer of accruable revenues to states and local government areas”, he added.
Created by an Act of the National Assembly in 2007, NEITI is to among other objectives, ensure due process and transparency in the payments made by all extractive industries/companies to the federation account;
Eliminate all forms of corrupt practices in the determination, payments, receipts and posting of revenue accruing to the FG from the extractive industry;
One of the key statutory functions of NEITI is ti conduct regular audits of the extractive sector.
