NNPC Admits N77.92bn Under-Remittance, Reminds FG of N797bn Debt

• NNPC Admits N77.92bn Under-Remittance, Reminds FG of N797bn Debt

The National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has acknowledged that it under-remitted N77.92 billion (approximately N78 billion) to the Federation Account from Domestic Crude Allocation in 2017. It also disclosed that a reconciliation process to deduct the under remitted fund from a N797 billion naira owed the Corporation by the Federal Government is ongoing.

This was disclosed in a statement released on Wednesday by the Nigeria Extractive Initiative (NEITI) through its Director Communications and Advocacy, Dr Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, who said NNPC made this claim after it was confronted with the N77.92 billion arrears by the Federal Government.

The statement also contained a report on the sale of Nigeria’s share of crude oil and gas produced in 2017; which NEITI said was a pilot study.

NEITI said, “The sum of N77.92 billion was under remitted by NNPC to the Federation Account from Domestic Crude Allocation in 2017.”

“NNPC acknowledges the under-remittance and states that there is an ongoing reconciliation to net off the N77.92 billion from the ‘the established Federation indebtedness to the Corporation of N797 billion, arising from KPMG forensic audit of the corporation at the instance of the Federation’ ‘’.

The report disclosed that the aggregate earning of the Federation from the sale of oil and gas in 2017 was $14.5 billion; which is the sum of $13.8 billion or 90.8 percent from crude oil and $1.31 billion or 9.1 percent from gas.

The report further revealed that NNPC deducted a total of N297 billion from the aggregate earning from the sale of Domestic crude oil; claiming that the deduction was for costs and losses; with N141.6 billion for under-recovery of petroleum products, N130.4 billion for pipeline repairs and N25 billion for crude oil and petroleum losses.

The report also showed that the country produced a total of 692 million barrels of crude oil in 2017 and that a share of 240.9 million barrels which signifies 35 percent of the total crude oil was received by the Federation.

Analysis of the report, however, revealed a 4 percent improvement from the 231.6 million barrels produced in 2016 but a 19 percent reduction from the 297.8 barrel produced in 2015.

“A trend analysis for the year under review shows that the 2017 federation share was four percent higher than the 231.6 million barrels in the same category for 2016 but was 19 percent lower than the 297.8 million barrels for 2015. This shows that while there was a slight improvement on the figure for 2016 (a year characterized by vandalism and sabotage of oil facilities) crude production for 2017 was about a fifth less than the 2015 level” it revealed.