NEITI reveals Nigeria loses N16.25 trn to oil theft

The NEITI report on the $74.386bn spent on fuel subsidy by successive governments since 2011 was submitted to the House of Representatives’ Committee on Public Accounts on Tuesday.

The Executive Secretary of Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Ogbonnaya Orji, handed over the report to the Chairman, House Committee on Public Accounts, Bamidele Salam during an interactive session in Abuja.

Orji disclosed that N16.25 trillion was lost to unabated crude oil theft, based on data collated and signed off by the operators and other stakeholders in the industry.

NEITI, he said, also unmasked over $8.3 billion unremitted revenue by some privately owned oil companies and Federal Government owned agencies which was not paid into the Federation Account contrary to extant financial regulations.

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To this effect, Orji said the agency is working collaboratively with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, the Independent Corrupt Practices and Related Offenses Commission as well as Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit to retrieve the funds into the federation account.

He said: “I have here, for instance, revenues we have earned from oil and gas since 1999. We also have here all the subsidy payments made. Since 2005 when it became a scandal, we began to collect the data. We began to ask questions about subsidy and as of 2021, the country had paid $74.386 billion in subsidy.

“And we have a breakdown of what was paid each year. We have also got a conversion of what that can possibly translate to”, he said.

On what the nation lost due to crude oil theft, the NEITI boss said, “In the course of this job, we have incentivized a lot of recoveries for the government because between what is paid and what was recovered, a lot of money in foreign exchange developed wings. Company A will say we paid $1 million and you go to the account of the receiving agency and you find out that either half of that money was not received or more is received than what was paid because of poor record keeping and carelessness.”