Former Central Bank Governor and now Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi
II who blew the lid on the missing NNPC money has reviewed the recently
released PWC auditors report on the missing NNPC monies. He shared his
thoughts in a piece titled 'Unanswered questions on Nigeria’s missing
oil revenue billions" published in the Financial Times yesterday May
13. Read what he wrote below
Just over a year ago President Goodluck Jonathan suspended
me from my position as governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria after I
questioned an estimated $20bn shortfall in oil revenues due to the
treasury from the state oil company. As I said then, you can suspend a
man, but you cannot suspend the truth. The publication last month of a
PwC audit into the “missing billions” brings us a step closer to it.
When I was central bank governor I raised three broad
questions. First, did the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation remit
to the government the entire proceeds of its crude oil sales? Second, if
it did not, is there proof of the purpose to which the unremitted
amounts were applied? And third, did NNPC have the legal authority to
withhold these funds?
Contrary to the claims of petroleum minister Diezani Alison-Madueke, the audit report does not exonerate the
NNPC. It establishes that the gap between the company’s oil revenues
between January 2012 and July 2013 and cash remitted to the government
for the same period was $18.5bn. And it goes into detail about the
NNPC’s account of how it used that money, which raises serious questions
about the legality of the state oil company’s conduct.
The auditors say a significant part of the unremitted funds
is supposed to have gone towards a kerosene subsidy that had been
stopped two and a half years earlier by the late President Umaru
Yar’Adua. His decree never appeared in the official gazette, leading
some to question whether it ever had legal force.
Evidence disclosed in the report suggests this is a
sideshow. The executive secretary of the agency charged with
administering subsidies confirmed that, acting on Yar’Adua’s orders, it
had ceased granting subsidies on kerosene. There was no appropriation
for such a subsidy in the 2012 or 2013 budgets.
Throughout all this, Nigerians paid 120-140 naira a litre of
kerosene, far more than the supposed subsidised price of 50 naira. Yet
the state oil company withheld $3.4bn to pay for a subsidy that in
effect did not exist. I have consistently held that this was a scam that
violated the constitution and siphoned off money from the treasury.
The second major item raised in the report relates to the transfer of
oil assets belonging to the federation to the Nigerian Petroleum
Development Company, a subsidiary of the NNPC.
NPDC has paid $100m for these assets, from which it
extracted crude valued at $6.8bn but paid tax and royalties worth $1.7bn
in the period scrutinised by the auditors. PwC was unable to establish
how much of the remaining $5.1bn should have been remitted to the
government. But the report showed that, along with the private companies
NPDC partnered with, it was extracting crude worth billions of dollars
but yielding very little revenue for the treasury. I was investigating
related transactions when I was suspended.
The third major item is a claim of $2.8bn by NNPC for
expenses not directly attributable to crude oil operations; PwC said
“clarity is required” on whether such upfront deductions from
remittances to the federation accounts are allowed, or whether the money
should have been remitted to the government. Finally, there are
duplicated expenses, “unsubstantiated” costs, computation “errors” and
tax shortfalls; a total of $1.48bn has to be refunded.
Of the $18.5bn in revenues that the state oil company did
not send to the government, about $12.5bn appears by my calculations to
have been diverted. And this relates only to a random 19-month period,
not the five-year term of Mr Jonathan, the outgoing president.
Nigerians did not vote for an amnesty for anyone. The lines
of investigation suggested by this audit need to be pursued. Any
officials found responsible for involvement in this apparent breach of
trust must be charged.
The writer is the emir of Kano and a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
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