NNPC/Capital oil crisis deepens, moves to recover N11bn missing petrol

The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) said it has alerted the Department of State Services, the Economic and the Financial Crimes Commission to help recover the over 130 million litres of petrol stored in the facilities of MRS Limited and Capital oil.

Providing details of the act by the companies, Henry Ikem-Obih, the NNPC Chief Operating Officer, Downstream, told journalists in Abuja that the infraction was discovered earlier in the year when the Corporation had need to access the over 100 million litres of petrol stored at the Capital Oil & Gas depot for NNPC Retail and over 30 million litres in MRS Limited depot all in Apapa area of Lagos.

Ikem-Obih said: “We instructed the Nigerian Products Marketing Company, a subsidiary of NNPC, to send additional trucks to those locations to move products for distribution aimed at meeting a supply shortfall we discovered in the market, but after days of not being able to access the terminals, we had to take a decision as NNPC Management to invite auditors and inspectors to go and do a physical check on the inventories.”

“After the meeting with them, we issued them with letters and told them in clear terms to do either of two things: return to us the full volume of what has been stored in their depots litre-for-litre or pay the full value of the products they took without our approval.”

Ikem-Obih disclosed that the Corporation alerted the Department of State Services, the Economic and Financial Crime Commission as well as the relevant committees of the National Assembly with oversight function on the corporation’s downstream operation to help recover the assets contrary to the insinuation that NNPC kept mute over the infraction until the Senate uncovered it.

He said so far, MRS has fully complied by returning the 30 million litres of Premium Motor Spirit (petrol) that it expropriated, while the Corporation had not achieved much progress with Capital Oil & Gas, which was yet to return 82 million litres of petrol, valued at N11 billion, out of over 100 million litres it took.

The COO further disclosed that NNPC had set up two committees to evaluate the roles played by some of its staff in the illegal product evacuation and review its entire throughput policy in order to align it with global best practices.

According to the COO Downstream, as part of efforts to forestall a repeat of similar occurrence in the future, a disciplinary committee was already investigating the level of involvement of its staff with a view to applying appropriate sanctions as a deterrence measure.