The House of Representatives has vowed to unravel the circumstances that led to the loss of over $2.4 billion revenue from alleged illegal sale of 48 million barrels of crude oil exported in 2015.
The House ad-hoc committee investigating the matter, gave this indication in Abuja on Thursday.
The House had last week Tuesday resolved to constitute an ad-hoc committee to probe the allegation when it adopted a motion sponsored by Isiaka Ibrahim from Ogun State, at plenary. The committee was also mandated to investigate all crude oil exports and sales by Nigeria from 2014 till date with regards to quantity, insurance, revenue generated, remittances into the federation accounts or other accounts as well as utilisation of the revenue for the period under review.
Ibrahim said in the motion that, “a whistle-blower alleged in July 2020 that he had in July 2015, brought to the attention of a committee purportedly set up by the president for the recovery of missing crude oil exports, the existence of 48 million barrels of Nigeria’s Bonny Light crude oil in storage at several ports in China, under the authorisation of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to sell the cargo.”
Mark Gbillah, chairman of the ad-hoc committee, in his remarks said the panel would engage local and foreign stakeholders to get to the roots of the matter, assuring whistle-blowers of adequate protection in the course of the exercise.
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Gbillah appealed to international partners of Nigeria such as the United States, Mexican and the Chinese government to give the committee the cooperation required and it would visit some of the countries to obtain the facts behind the matter.
The lawmaker commended President Muhammadu Buhari for bringing forth the whistle-blower though he and the minister of finance recently admitted that it has not been successful in terms of the amount of revelation and the recoveries expected.
“Now the committee takes very seriously issues that have to do with allegations. We owe to Nigerians a duty of care to ensure that we unravel the facts of the matter before we start to make any assertions.
“It is obviously going to be important for us to arrive at the conclusion and provide a substantive report that would determine whether or not these issues transpired and in carrying out our functions, one of the things we are going to need to do would be to interview those that made the allegations.
“Some of them have reached out to the committee alleging threat to their lives. They were intimidated at gun point allegedly. So, we will have to travel out of the country, to the United States, Mexico, China. I believe considering the amount of borrowing our country is subjected to now, $2.4 billion is money this country seriously needs.
“So, it is not something that this House is taking lightly. The leadership of the House is in support of this committee arriving at the truth and the facts of this matter. And it shows the seriousness of this House in addressing issues that have to do with the commonwealth of Nigerians.
“Even though these allegations were made about two years ago, you can see that this responsible House of the Nigerian people has still deemed it necessary to look into this matter even as we go about our electioneering campaigns.
“We want to assure all the whistle-blowers who have revelations to provide to this honourable committee that their information would be treated in the strictest level of confidence as it is done all over the world in other climes. we can receive evidence behind closed doors before we make it public because we too are concerned about spurious and false allegations”, he said.
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