AFTER $20bn Missing: NNPC Fails Again To Refund $1.48bn To Federation Account, Says FAAC

AFTER $20Bn OIL MONEY MISSING: NNPC Fails Again To Refund $1.48bn To Federation Account, Says FAAC

The Federation Accounts Allocation Committee rose from its meeting late on Friday disappointed that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation failed for the umpteenth time to remit the $1.48bn reported by PriceWaterHouse Coopers in its forensic audit of the corporation.

Following the allegation by the former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, that the corporation failed to remit about $20bn revenue from its operations in 2011, the audit firm had confirmed an unreconciled figure of about $1.48 billion, which NNPC agreed to pay as soon as possible, PREMIUM TIMES reports.

Although the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, said recently that the corporation had started refunding the money, chairman, Forum of Finance Commissioners of FAAC, Timothy Odaah, raised alarm during the FAAC meeting late on Friday that no such money has been received by Federation Account.

In March, after the NNPC failed to pay the money, the FAAC, during its meeting in April, constituted a committee to investigate why the corporation was delaying to make the refund as directed.

However, Mr. Odaah said during the meeting the committee reported to members that the NNPC had not made the refund as expected. He did not say why the corporation failed.

“We have to let the public to know that we demanded for the refund, because it is the money meant for the states and the Federal Government as well as the local governments,” Mr. Odaah, who is also the Ebonyi state commissioner of finance, said.

The Minister of State for Finance, Bashir Yuguda, said at the end of the meeting that a total of N388bn was distributed as statutory allocation to the federal government and the 36 states of the federation and 774 local governments for the month of April, 2015.

The Minister said the total distributable revenue for the month included about N75.1bn realized from value added tax (VAT).

Details of revenue shared among the three tiers of government, Mr. Yuguda said, showed that the Federal Government received N132.1bn, representing 52.68 per cent, while the 36 states got N67bn, representing 26.72 per cent.

The local governments, he said, received N51.6bn, amounting to 20.60 per cent of the amount distributed, with N23.1bn, representing 13 per cent derivation revenue, shared among the nine oil producing states.

On the declining revenue shared in the past months, the minister attributed it to the “frequent shut-downs and shut-ins of trunk lines and pipelines at oil terminals continued to impact negatively on crude oil revenue.”

To check the situation, the minister urged the incoming administration to ensure that it focused more on the diversification of the economic base, ensure accountability and good governance and block all revenue leakages to attain optimum service delivery.