Lagos — THE Nigerian foreign mission in the United States of America has claimed ignorance of the ongoing restructuring exercise in the oil and gas industry, adding that this has made it impossible for staff to answer queries from prospective investors.

Meanwhile some members of the Petroleum Technology Association of Nigeria (PETAN), an umbrella group of oil industry service providers have lamented dwindling fortunes in their operations owing to reduced patronage from the joint venture operators and production sharing contracts.

The revelation was made during a presentation by the PETAN to Mr. Emmanuel Odusina, the Minister of state for Energy (Gas) at the ongoing Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) in Houston, Texas.

After the presentation, during the question and answer session, a staff of the Nigerian mission in the USA had drawn the minister's attention to the paucity of information at the disposal of the mission, noting that this has hampered their ability to effectively furnish prospective investors with adequate information.

Interestingly, the minister did not respond to this submission, rather, he wanted to know what the local content percentage of joint venture operators in the award of contracts to the service providers represented in PETAN amounts to.

Some members of the Association who did not want their names in print decried the minister's seeming lack of grasp of the issues noting that he should be the one providing statistics and not the other way round.

The state controlled Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is the largest equity holder of the oil industry joint venture operations with an average 57 per cent.

The National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), a subsidiary of the Corporation supervises the joint venture agreements and production sharing contracts and the Corporation is in turn supervised by the Ministry of Energy.

Essentially, the minister aught to have data on the degree of implementation of local content in both the joint venture and the production sharing contracts at his finger tip.

The ministry under the Olusegun Obasanjo administration had set a local content target of 45 by 2006 with the expectation that it should grow to 70 per cent by 2010.

However, by 2006, government reported that local content had reached 18 per cent and indications are that at the end of 2007 it was still less than 20 per cent.

While speaking on the sidelines of the conference and exhibition, some members of PETAN disclosed that in the last two years they have been forced to lay off more than half their staff due to lack of patronage.

Similarly, despite the lack of patronage bank facilities taken out to augment their operations as well as cost of overhead continues to take a toll on their finances and capacity to remain in business.

It was gathered that the Jagal Group, operators of Niger Dock has laid-off another 300 employees bringing the total haul between last year and now to 700 personnel owing to its dwindling capacity to pay redundant workers.