The House of Representatives Ad hoc Committee on Subsidy Regime yesterday came hard on some importers of petroleum products for deliberately creating loopholes to benefit from the subsidy regime. Although some of the marketers have earlier been reportedly indicted in an audit report by KPMG, Chairman of the Committee, Hon. Farouk Lawan, said that there was a huge differential in the claims received by the marketers in 2010 and 2011.
The KPMG report was said to have accused Dee Jones Petroleum and Vitol Oil of negligence and illegally creating loopholes to benefit from the subsidy payment. Managing Director of Dee Jones Petroleum, Mr. Samuel Chukwudi Eze, had told the committee that the firm received N2.74bn for subsidy payment in 2009, N4.38bn in 2010 and N12bn in 2011, attributing the huge differentials to the high exchange rate in 2011.
Another marketer, Vitol Oil, was accused of conniving with oil marketers who did not have any storage facility to use their tank farms as if they were owned by the company and hence tricking the Petroleum Product Pricing and Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, into giving import allocation based on such facilities.
The committee was, therefore, constrained to mandate both firms to avail it of all records of the bill of lading and invoices of the said payments made within the period. It also ordered the firms to provide documents of their existing relationship and dealings with the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC. Lawan expressed concern over the failure of the chief executives of some of the indicted companies to appear before the committee, stressing that henceforth, proxies would not be allowed.
He directed all the marketers to submit their certificates of incorporation, letters of credits, letters of allocations, bills of lading, invoices, quantities of products imported and their countries of origin and evidence of payments. The committee also expressed reservations that most of the companies were owned by people who are politically exposed and have close links with people in government, and warned them to desist from submitting doctored documents to the committee.
Managing Director of Brittania Oil Nigeria Ltd, Mrs. Uju Ifedika, told the committee that although her company would soon embark on the construction of refineries in Nigeria, the failure of the Federal Government to ensure the constant supply of crude to privately-built refineries was anti-investment.
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