Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources (Downstream) says the federal government wasted N784 billion on fraudulent importation of petroleum products in 2017.
The committee, in a report, put the total surplus in the volume of petroleum imported in 2017 by both the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the marketers at 5.9 billion litres, which, when multiplied by the N133 landing cost, gives the sum of N784 billion.
It noted that shortages in the volume of fuel claimed to have been supplied by the NNPC and the independent marketers were major factors that led to the scarcity of fuel nationwide.
The Senator Kabiru Marafa-led committee explained that, “since the NNPC said it is importing 30 cargoes of 30,000mt (minimum) of PMS monthly through the DSDP Scheme, it means NNPC is importing 1.2m litres of PMS monthly.
Therefore, at an average consumption of 35 million litres/day, NNPC said the country consumes between 27-30 million litres/day from January to September and 30-40 million litres/day from September to December 2017.
The report further pointed out that “the marketers, on the other hand, received from government about $1,669,180,182 at Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) rate of N305 to a dollar to import petrol from January to August 2017.”
This means that marketers were supposed to bring into the country about 3.8 billion litres of PMS at a landing cost of N133. In other words, marketers’ supplies were supposed to serve the country for about 109 days at 35 million litres daily in 2017.
