Leon Usigbe
18 June 2008
Lagos — The House of Representatives Joint Committee investigating the activities of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and its subsidiaries has rejected offers by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and other donors to offset the cost of the committee's activities.
It also discovered that oil block bids were not advertised prior to their allocation from 2004. Co-chairman of the committee, Igoh Aguma, told newsmen yesterday that the committee turned down the sponsorship requests because it feared that some of the sponsors of the NGOs could be major players in the oil and gas sector being investigated.
According to him, the rejection was, therefore, an effort to ensure that no opportunity was given for any individual or organisation to unduly influence the course of events. "Agencies have approached us to pay the consultants but we said that we are not interested in that because NGOs have donors. We don't know whether the donors are major players in the industry," he said. He also debunked reports that the committee had submitted a bill of N500 million for its work, saying it would require only about N50 million to complete the present phase of investigation which he said was merely working on "historical data." "The consultancy cost is less than 10% of what has been mentioned. The consultants have been working even though they have not been paid. They see the job appearing on their CV as more important than the money," the co-chairman said.
The committee said a lot of work had been accomplished in the area of Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and the NNPC in terms of lifting of crude, importation of refined petrol products, its distribution and the allocation of fuel oil including condensates and the likes.
"We are also receiving memoranda from interested Nigerians. In a lot of the memoranda, Nigerians have provided the bulk of the information we need that at the end of the day we are beginning to understand what has been going on especially within the sector where we have actually commenced work on.
"I must say that our emphasis has been on identifying what the due process is for each activity. Then you test that due process and find out the company or the individual or the party that benefitted from activity outside of the due process. "And I must say without concluding that our preliminary reports that are coming in are beginning to throw up such activities where guidelines are set and organisations that did not follow those guidelines benefitted from those guidelines.
"Let me be a little more specific. Every bid round for the allocation of oil block has its guidelines and we have found out that in successive years, especially from 2004 to 2007, the guidelines have been modified positively in some cases based on the outcomes of the previous year. "What we have done now is to determine whether every company followed the due process. If there are companies that did not follow due process, we will pry further into the nature of those companies in term of their composition and why they had to be exempted from following the due process.
"In terms of crude allocation, between 1999 and 2004, we found out preliminarily that apart from the advertisement for people to lift crude in 1999, we did not have adverts and the beginning of that due process is to place adverts to qualify people and it is expected that 90 days before the expiration of a particular set of contracts to lift crude, adverts will be placed.
"We found out that for those years that we have got to so far, something unique happened, adverts were not placed and at the same time, we had a situation where some companies were rolled over and even in rolling over, we have to find out why that was done," the committee revealed," he said.
The chairman said memorandum has been received from the NNPC, assuring that the investigation exercise would be thorough.
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