Some members of the Presidential Task Force on Petroleum Revenue are preparing for a showdown with the Chairman, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, over the leakage of the draft report, contents of which the government has disowned.
The draft report, leaked last week, underlined the huge rot in the operations and management of the nation’s oil and gas sector in the 10-year period between 2001 and 2011.
The leakage and reports of an attempt to cover up wrong doings by top officials in the oil and gas sector, prompted President Goodluck Jonathan to order the task force to submit the report by Friday, a situation that has created a rift among members, who are pointing accusing fingers at Ribadu over the leakage.
A committee member said last night that Ribadu had failed to carry all members along in the assignment and his methods had pitched him against some members who are senior legal practitioners “We had to caution him at a point when he caused EFCC operatives to arrest some people who were still under investigations,” the source said.
However, a member of the task force, Chief Anthony George Ikoli, SAN, responding to the leakage said yesterday that the report was yet to be finalised and disowned the version currently in circulation.
He said: “The committee’s work is factually yet to be definitively concluded; consequently a final report which would be the culmination of the processes and procedures agreed and adopted by the committee cannot exist, especially not in the format being circulated by the media both social and print.”
George-Ikoli, the immediate past Attorney- General of Bayelsa State, said that the last time the committee met was in June and that the subcommittee in charge of writing the final report was yet to submit it.
“The report writing subcommittee has not received, reviewed, revised and submitted a preliminary report for the committee of the whole for further consideration.
“The necessary levels and procedures to identify figures, facts and information as well as mandatory authentication and cross checking to ensure information data integrity and credibility cannot be said to have been done or carried out,” he said.
Ikoli said that at the last meeting of the committee, a written proposal presented to the committee members was advised to be “subjected to the established integral norms and procedures of civilized conduct in a setting such as ours.
“Many members of the committee are just as shocked and annoyed as I am that such painstaking work being conducted by the committee could be so ridiculed by the unsubstantiated reporting of such a respected global news agency. People of unimpeachable character populate this committee; the manner in which this news story was procured only serves to question the integrity of these people, which is rather unfortunate
“I personally believe the distraction generated by this story is unnecessary as it would neither aid the attainment of the anti-corruption agenda of government or the terms reference of the committee,” he added.
Apart from George-Ikoli, there are at least three other prominent lawyers in the task force. They are Chief Olisa Agbakoba, SAN; Chief Anthony Idigbe, SAN; and Mr. Olasupo Sasore; SAN, who is also the former Attorney-General of Lagos State, who serves as the secretary of the task force.
Efforts to contact Ribadu last night were unsuccessful as calls to his number did not go through.
According to the leaked document, the operations of the government agencies charged with managing oil and gas resources have been fraught with lack of accountability, weak legislation, and huge losses as a result of oil theft and short-changing of government by oil firms through unpaid royalties and signature bonuses.
For example, the committee found inconsistencies in pattern of allocation of 445,000 barrels per day to the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, and prices paid for such allocations over the 10 year period and that the government might have been short-changed to the tune of $5bn from the application of price differentials.
The task force also found that the exchange rates used in arriving at the naira equivalent of the amounts payable for the domestic crude allocation differed from the Central Bank of Nigeria’ official rates for six of the 10 years reviewed.
“The potential underpayment of amounts payable to the Federation Account over the 10- year period is estimated at N86.6bn,” the report said.
The report further pointed out that a total of N37.5bn was due to the government from gas sales from the Bonga field operated by Shell as at 2009.
It also raised eyebrows over the pricing of gas sold to the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG, which was lower than international prices and claimed that the cumulative deficit between the international market value and what was obtained from NLNG was approximately $29bn over the 10 year period.
The task force report also faulted the management of the oil block allocations and bid rounds pointing out that there was outstanding balance of $566m unpaid in signature bonuses from the 67 licenses were awarded between 1 January 2005 and 31 December 2011 in addition to $183m outstanding on seven discretionary allocations reviewed, though $321m of this amount was legally disputed
The task force also found that “there is no single point accountability for the income and expenditure streams of upstream petroleum operations”, a situation compounded by the current structure of the NNPC and the multiple roles it played in the sector.
This is in addition to it faulting the practice of the use of oil traders in crude lifting contrary to the global trend wherein national oil companies develop their own trading arms and raised concern that Nigeria being the world’s only major oil producer that sells 100 per cent of its crude to private commodities traders, rather than directly to refineries.
According to the report, the NNPC Joint Venture operations had been riddled with problem as the government had failed to allocate enough funds to meet cash call obligation standing at N459.5bn as at end of 2009 and had resulted in NNPC having to borrow money to pay its partners at considerable cost.
A further review of the operations of the NNPC showed that the company and its 16 subsidiaries were in an operational deficit of about N298bn for the period and that the company was grossly underfunded while it was being owed about N27bn while the company also owed supplier about $3.6bn.
National Mirror
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