Nigeria nears publication of beneficial ownership

The Department of Petroleum Resources, (DPR) a regulator of the upstream sector says that it close to completing a framework for the disclosure and publication of owners of companies in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry.

Sixty one years after crude oil was discovered in Nigeria, a record of the true owners of oil acreages remains illusory helping to keep the sector opaque and giving room for corruption.

According to the DPR, it is creating the framework along with the Extractive Industry Transparency International (EITI). The organisation said it will make it public on January 1, 2020.

“The joint committee of DPR and NEITI, with their consultant, working on beneficial ownership register, has worked so hard on the target. It has developed a framework for the register itself,” said Ahmad Rufai Shakur, acting director, DPR

Shakur further said, “We have done a test-run and we are 80 per cent ready to get the register in place,” he said, adding, “it is going to be a very tasking work, because we shall keep updating as the farming-in and farming out continue.”

Earlier this year, the European Commission added Saudi Arabia, Pnama, Nigeria and twenty other countries to a blacklist of nations that pose a threat because of lax controls, terrorism financing and money laundering and a key reason is the lack of transparency over the beneficial owners of companies and trusts.

Inclusion in this list indicates reputational damage to the country and further complicates financial relations with the European Union. this means that banks in the EU will have to carry out additional checks on payments involving entities from listed jurisdictions.

Though the government of President Muhammadu Buhari has made fighting corruption a key pillar of its government, it has often been criticised for tardy response to corrupt government officials with ties to the president and lack of political will to carry out legal reforms that could check corruption as indicated by the President’s refusal to assent the Audit bill which demands greater accountability from government’s ministries and agencies.