04-05-06
Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency
Initiative, or NEITI, said it will summon oil companies and relevant government
agencies to a meeting in a bid to locate $ 250 mm of oil revenues said to be
missing from official records.
"We are calling a meeting soon and everybody will come with their documents for
us to reconcile whatever needs to be reconciled," EITI executive secretary
Bright Okogu told.
The move follows the rejection by President Olusegun Obasanjo of the audit
report of the Nigerian oil industry, which showed the amount couldn't be
accounted for.
"You should realize the society we are in. Before you know it, they would say it
is Obasanjo who has stolen the $ 250 mm," Obasanjo said at the weekly Federal
Executive Council meeting.
Obasanjo set up the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to arrest and
prosecute people involved in financial crimes. Obasanjo stopped the presentation
of the audit report to the Council, saying that the missing revenue must be
traced before the report can be presented to the Federal Executive Council.
"We have $ 250 mm hanging and my own belief is either it is misclassified,
wrongly posted or somebody did not make payment for what it should have paid,"
Obasanjo said.
Obasanjo rejected pleas by the Minister of Solid Minerals and NEITI Chairman,
Obiageli Ezekwesili, for the full report to be presented. Obasanjo asked why "a
thorough job was not done before the report was presented to the Council."
Obasanjo gave the agencies involved three months to locate the source of the
discrepancies.
NEITI commissioned the Hart Group, a London-based conglomerate, to undertake the
audit, which covered the period from 1999 to 2004.
The investigation, which comprised financial, physical, and process audits,
aimed to "reconcile both the revenues and the physical production of oil, and
examine the finances and business processes of both private and state-owned
companies and regulatory authorities and indigenous and international oil and
gas companies operating in Nigeria," NEITI said.
The statement said discrepancies between records by the Central Bank of Nigeria
and the oil companies' reported payments "were quite significant."
Source: Dow Jones Newswires