Four Months after former President Goodluch Jonathan directed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation to refund $1.48bn (N291.56bn) into the Federation Account, the corporation has yet to do so.
An international audit firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, was last year hired to carry out a forensic audit of the corporation following an allegation by the former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Lamido Sanusi, that $49bn was not remitted to the Federation Account by the NNPC.
Sanusi, who is now the Emir of Kano, had written a letter to Jonathan that the amount was not remitted to the Federation Account by the NNPC.
But following the controversy, which the letter generated, a committee was set up to reconcile the account.
Sanusi later recanted and said the unremitted fund was $12bn. He again changed the figure to $20bn.
PwC had stated in its report that while the total gross revenues generated from crude oil lifting was $69.34bn between January 2012 and July 2013 and not $67bn as earlier stated by the Senate Reconciliation Committee, what was remitted to the Federation Account was $50.81bn and not $47bn.
Within the $69.34bn, the audit report revealed that $28.22bn was the value of the domestic crude oil allocated to the NNPC, adding that the total amount spent on subsidy for Premium Motor Spirit amounted to $5.32bn.
But speaking on Tuesday shortly after this month’s Federation Account Allocation Committee meeting, the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Finance, Mrs. Anastacia Nwaobia, said no amount had been refunded as directed by Jonathan.
She said, “On refund from the NNPC, that was not discussed but you can see that from the breakdown, we have a refund of what we have been expecting from the NNPC to the Federal Government. We had a refund of about N6.33bn.
“The refund that you are asking about, maybe it is a fallout of the forensic audit; that has not been done. The forensic audit is still being considered and I am sure that when a decision is taken, it will be communicated and you will have that information.”
Speaking on the amount shared at the meeting, Nwaobia said the sum of N418.4bn was shared among the federal, states and local governments as revenue for the month of May.
She said that the shared amount comprised the month’s statutory revenue of N324bn and N6.3bn refunded by NNPC, being the corporation’s indebtedness to the federation before the release of the forensic audit report.
The permanent secretary said, “The gross revenue of N324.96bn received for the month was higher than the N282.06bn received in the previous month by N41.99bn. The distributable statutory revenue for the month is N324.06bn. The sum of N6.33bn was refunded by the NNPC to the Federal Government.
“Also, there was an exchange gain of N31.24bn, which is proposed for distribution. The total revenue distributable for the current month, including VAT, is N418.4bn.”
Giving the breakdown of the revenue shared among the three tiers of government, Nwaobia said after deducting the sum of N6.82bn as cost of collection, the Federal Government received N151.8bn, representing 52.68 per cent; states, N76.9bn, or 26.72 per cent of the total; while the local governments received N59.3bn, or 20.60 per cent of the amount distributed.
She announced that N29bn, representing 13 per cent derivation revenue, was also shared among the oil producing states.
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