Mallam Lamido Sanusi, governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has said that the outstanding unremitted amount due to the federation account from the sale of crude oil by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) is $20 billion and not $10.8 billion as previously thought.
But the NNPC said that the apex regulator of the Nigeria’s financial industry was inconsistent and lacked understanding of the petroleum auditing processes.
Sanusi stated this at the resumed public investigation on the alleged unremitted $49.8billion crude oil revenue yesterday by the Senate Committee on Finance at the National Assembly.
Sanusi alleged that out of the $67billion crude oil sold by the NNPC, only $47billion had been receipted by the CBN, leaving a balance of $20 billion.
The CBN governmor had last year written a letter to President Goodluck Jonathan, accusing NNPC of failure to account for $49.8bn accruing from unremitted amount from the sale of crude oil.
This prompted the President to direct all the stakeholders to have a joint meeting to reconcile the amount in question. At the end of the exercise, it was agreed by the parties, which included the Finance Ministry, CBN, NNPC, the Budget Office, Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS, Directorate of Petroleum Resources DPR, and Petroleum Products Pricing and Regulatory Agency, PPPRA, that the outstanding amount was $10.8bn.
Sanusi’s fresh allegation came as Mr. Andrew Yakubu, NNPC group managing director faulted the governor’s claims, stressing that the CBN as bankers did not understand the petroleum auditing processes.
Yakubu also accused Sanusi of bandying the entire gross earnings of NNPC instead of actual net earnings.
Senator Ahmed Makarfi, chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, expressed indifference to the allegations raised by Sanusi.
According to Makarfi, what Sanusi said was not a fresh issue, as it was already known to the committee and the reconciliation team set up on the matter.
He directed the various teams handling the reconciliation of the said unremitted accounts to fast-track their activities and come up with the exact amount by Thursday next week, when the public hearing would reconvene.
Sanusi said: “I have a 20 page presentation with 30 appendages but we have to first of all agree on what has been paid into the CBN. NNPC did a presentation. We have all agreed earlier that $14billion out of the $67billion they shipped came in to the dollar account of the federation.
NNPC boss however said that said: “The issues that were raised are not new at all. You see we came out in details because we don’t have anything to hide and we gave a detailed breakdown of the so called $49bn and we came out clearly to state the various streams that are associated with what he was talking about.
“Now, we also made it clear that NPDC (National Petroleum Development Company), if we had anything to hide we would not have made it clear that NPDC was part of the stream, because NPDC which is NNPC’s upstream operation, is a limited liability company registered under the Companies and Allied Matters Act, CAMA, to do upstream business just like any other independent company.