The Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) late Thursday dismissed the reports that senior officials of the corporation sold 48 million barrels of crude oil to China in 2015.
An oil and gas trading company, SAMANO SA DE CV, had early in the week petitioned the NNPC demanding a compensation fee of 5 percent for giving the corporation reliable information on massive crude oil theft that happened in 2015.
The company had claimed that the useful information it gave to high-profile Nigerians including Mele Kyari (NNPC GMD); former Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari; and Umar Mohammed led to the recovery of the massive volume of crude oil which it claimed was stored in several ports and terminals in China.
Kenny Obateru, group general manager, Public Affairs Division of NNPC, had told BusinessDay on Sunday that the state-owned oil company had no comment on the matter at that moment.
But in a statement issued by Afe Babalola, counsel to NNPC, the corporation said it was impossible for the country to ship 48 million barrels of crude oil from Nigeria to China without any record.
Babalola said a blackmailer was doing all within his/her power to extort money from the corporation.
“The management of the corporation states emphatically that these publications are replete with falsehoods, offensive, gold-digging and a calculated attempt by the said SAMANO SA DE CV (SAMANO) working in concert with its local and international agents to intimidate, blackmail and extort money from the Federal Government of Nigeria and NNPC,” he said.
Babalola said in view of the attention the said publications have generated, it was necessary for the NNPC to make the following clarifications:
“SAMANO first contacted officials of the Federal Government of Nigeria sometime in 2015 indicating that it had been approached by an unnamed group in the People’s Republic of China to buy 48 Million Barrels of Nigerian Crude Oil which they believed to have been stolen from Nigeria. According to SAMANO, this crude had been stolen and shipped to China before the inception of President Buhari’s administration in 2015.
“SAMANO requested that it be allowed to purchase the stolen crude after its recovery by the Federal Government.
“Shortly thereafter, SAMANO indicated that it was not interested in buying the said stolen crude as it only obliged the Federal Government with the information to assist the President Buhari-led administration’s fight against corruption.
“The Federal Government and NNPC receive hundreds of spurious claims of this nature daily, and they always turn out to be false.
“NNPC also believed that based on the operations and state of the international crude oil market in 2015, it was impossible to ship 48 Million Barrels of Crude Oil from Nigeria to China without any record,” the statement said.
To put the issue in context, NNPC said as of 2015, the daily production of crude oil in Nigeria was below 1.6 million barrels.
“Therefore, 48 million barrels of crude oil would have been the total production capacity of the country for a whole month. It was and remains simply impossible for one-month crude oil production for the entire country to disappear without any record or trace from the shores of the country,” it said.
The statement said during a fact-finding trip to China, it was discovered that SAMANO’s claim was false as there were no 48 million barrels of stolen Nigerian crude oil or any stolen Nigerian crude oil in any port, terminal or storage facility in China.
The corporation said SAMANO failed to show that it followed “due process” in the information that allegedly led to the recovery of stolen crude oil.
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